The Eastern Cape is set to overtake Gauteng as the province with the second-highest confirmed cases of Coronavirus infections in the country.

This is not surprising, as the province already has the highest rate of infections in prisons, and the second-highest rate of cases, recoveries and deaths per million people nationally.

The disease is spreading rapidly across the province, and the Department of Health does not have the capacity to do effective tracking, tracing, and implementing containment measures to slow the spread.

We need to put out these bush fires before they become raging infernos. Testing backlogs need to be eradicated and tracking and tracing needs to be ramped up across the province.

There are currently thousands of outstanding test results, per district, across the province. These people, who could be infected but be asymptomatic, are going about their daily business while waiting to hear their results, instead of self-isolating.

This behaviour then increases the risk of cluster transmissions in communities across the province.
Even when pockets of infections are identified, the Department of Health does not have sufficient capacity to send teams to immediately screen and test close contacts of those infected by the virus.
A delay of even one day can result in greater transmissions, which should be prevented at all costs.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) have identified the Chris Hani and OR Tambo districts as significantly high-risk areas for three reasons:

1. they have a high population density;
2. the people living there have a high vulnerability index (many live with pre-existing health conditions)
3. there is high potential for transmission.

These three factors could result in the Chris Hani and OR Tambo districts becoming superclusters and negate all efforts to flatten the curve and reduce transmissions, both in those districts and across the province.

I have once again written to the MEC for Health to appeal to her to ensure that the test result backlog is eliminated as a matter of extreme urgency, in order that accurate and relevant data is harvested.

This will allow for more effective strategies to track and trace all close contacts of those who have tested positive for the virus, as is the modus operandi in the Western Cape.

I have further appealed to her to ramp up testing capacity in the three laboratories that are currently responsible for analysis in the province, to ensure that they are adequately prepared for the coming spike in infections.

Issued by DA