Drastic measures on the cards for Western Cape

HEALTH Minister Zweli Mkhize said the health department’s interventions in the Western Cape’s Covid-19 outbreak could include ordering people into quarantine without testing and placing parts of the province back into hard lockdown.

Mkhize told the National Council of Provinces that the Western Cape’s high incidence of Covid-19 cases, which equalled almost two-thirds of the national total, risked becoming a reality nationwide unless strict measures were imposed in the region.

“The reality is that the rest of the country will have the same [number of infections] if we don’t contain what is happening in the Western Cape,” he said.

The minister dismissed assertions that the province had been more efficient at testing than others and said it had moreover fallen short on tracing contacts of the more than 15 000 cases within its borders.

Nationally, 44 042 contacts have been identified and 93% have been traced.

However, he said, in the Western Cape the percentage was 83%, the lowest of all provinces.

He said the national department had dispatched experts to the province who would help implement a “wall-towall” approach in finding those considered at risk of carrying the disease.

They would be isolated, where necessary in government-appointed facilities, in a bid to prevent the province’s hospitals being flooded with new cases.

Mkhize conceded that a national shortage of diagnostic material meant that confinement instructions could be issued without testing, but on the basis of clinical suspicion.

“We will use clinical judgement to say this one is positive … because the rate of infection is high enough to know where the suspicion is high,” he said.

If necessary, wards or smaller areas within districts would revert to more restrictive lockdown rules to contain the spread of the virus, Mkhize said.

South Africa will shift from level 4 to level 3 lockdown restrictions on June 1, but Cape Town and five other metropolitan areas have been designated as hotspots where targeted interventions will be implemented. This classification is to be reviewed fortnightly.

Mkhize said the government would determine the alert level for districts on the basis of active infections, transmission trends and health care capacity to deal with these, and then submit the level to the provincial command council.