Health minister Dr Zweli Mkhize says that his department has got the most out of the lockdown and that the current risk adjusted strategy is about buying time for South Africans to adjust to the new normal. Covid19SA
Government is co-ordinating the deployment of teams to Covid-19 hotspots including epidemiologists, family practitioners, community health workers, environmental officers, social workers, psychologists and community workers to deal with the health and social challenges, says health minister Zweli Mkhize.
“In reality from the health perspective, we have actually got the maximum benefit from the lockdown. Now, what we need to do is to adjust all our containment measures so that we now adjust to a new normal of how we will be living. As we implement it, we are going to move on, we can’t suddenly say let us open everything.
“You are going to be forced to deal with clusters where tomorrow there are so many people infected and if you end up with that situation, you will close down those very same places all over again because you did not do the preparations.
He said the country needed to prevent the kind of cluster outbreaks which have been seen in the Western Cape leading to a spike in infections. The province currently accounts for over half of the country’s infections, having overtaken Gauteng as the infection centre. Currently the country has 14,355 confirmed cases, the death toll stands at 261. The Western Cape has 8,404 confirmed cases, which is 58.5% of the country’s total cases.
Mkhize said that it was not true that the province was testing more than anywhere else and that the simple reason for the high numbers was the concentrated outbreaks in places with high traffic such as retail stores. Similar scenes also played themselves out in KwaZulu-Natal in private hospitals where patients and health care workers were infected.
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