‘We may run out of ICU beds by June’

HEALTH Minister Zweli Mkhize has emphasised that Covid-19 has been an unfolding pandemic that everyone has been learning about over the past few months, and that nobody has all the answers.

Yesterday in a briefing held by Mkhize’s Department of Health, Covid-19 experts added even more grim news for the country as they projected that it faced the risk of running out of ICU beds as early as June.

This followed projections made on Tuesday by the Modelling and Simulation Hub, Africa, from UCT, which said that South Africa could reach up to 1 million infections and more than 40 000 coronavirus-related deaths by November.

Mkhize said that South Africans should appreciate that Covid-19 had been an unfolding pandemic and that the whole world was still working out how to deal with it.

“But there are many lessons to learn that can guide our response as South Africans,” he said.

According to Covid-19 modellers, the entire country faces the prospect of running out of ICU beds by as early as next month, with the Western Cape expected to be the hardest hit by the shortage.

With the country’s Covid-19 infections yesterday reaching more than 19 000 and 369 deaths, the Western Cape leads the country’s nine provinces as it has amassed 12 153 positive cases of the virus, and 235 deaths.

Mkhize said that no Covid-19 model had been able to predict what had happened in the Western Cape.

“The one model that I saw predicted that it was going to be Gauteng that would be exploding first, and that Gauteng would be followed by Kwazulu-natal,” he said.

On Tuesday evening Mkhize took a swipe at Professor Glenda Gray, the chairperson of the research sub-committee team of 50 expert Covid-19 pandemic advisers to the government, who had recently criticised some of the regulations of the nationwide lockdown.

She said that they had not been grounded in science, with one impact of the lockdown regulations being a flare-up in malnutrition among children.

However, Mkhize said that Gray’s comments were “at the least devoid of the truth”.

“It can never be Prof Gray’s place to make such comments without being aware of the details, the advice and the process the Department of Basic Education has followed,” he said.

Dr Kerrigan Mccarthy, a member of the Covid-19 ministerial advisory committee and a senior pathologist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, said that the situation the country was facing was unique as there was no global matrix or blueprint on how to handle the pandemic.

Mccarthy said that the experts who were advising Mkhize were a group of medically trained scientists who had long histories in service delivery in terms of public sector health-care provision and health activism.

“We are able to give our response to the Covid-19 pandemic as the fruit of our years of experience of working in health.

“But where we are not experts is the impact of health policies on other sectors of the economy, education, on people’s psychological well-being – and all of these factors need to be taken into account when one calculates a risk benefit assessment and decides on what actions and responses to take,” Mccarthy said.

She added that countries across the world were grappling with similar questions, such as to what degree they should infringe on people’s liberty in order to benefit their citizens the most.

“There isn’t a right answer, there is no nice formula that says if you do this you will decrease deaths, or if you don’t do this deaths are going to rise, and we’re trying to figure it out as a society and as health experts, and of course we’re all going to have different opinions,” Mccarthy said.