COVID: Decision on government’s intervention in Gauteng to be taken next week
Acting Health Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane said she would be meeting with the National Coronavirus Command Council next week Tuesday where a report would be tabled on the growing concerns of daily COVID-19 infections in Gauteng.
The facility is a 175 bedded hospital and will assist in addressing the dire shortage of critical care beds in the West Rand district and relieve pressure from both Leratong and Carletonville hospitals. pic.twitter.com/WXJxPnGVdU
— Gauteng Health (@GautengHealth) June 25, 2021
She said only thereafter a decision would be taken on whether this province needed stricter lockdown regulations or not. The acting minister met with the Gauteng government on Thursday and will be meeting with the ministerial advisory committee on COVID-19 on Saturday to discuss concerns during the third wave, especially in Gauteng.
“There’s been lessons out of the previous waves, so we’ll take it from there. I don’t want to say what is going to happen out of that. We’ve listened to the premier as well, where the issues around what they would want to see in terms of Gauteng and what they don’t want to see. So we’ll address that next week after the NCC meeting in terms of what has been the decision,” said Kubayi-Ngubane.
“Gauteng’s pressure on the beds is very significant; the North West and the Northern Cape also have pressure on the beds at this stage,” added the health department’s Anban Pillay.
He said there was a huge demand for more beds in the majority of the country. He said the third wave of COVID-19 infections, especially in Gauteng, caused a huge demand for ICU beds, and specialized nurses were in demand.
“A lot of pressure is around ICU beds, given that they’ve had a sustained level of transmission for quite a while, but certainly Gauteng is showing high increases in ICU beds and as you know, this is an area where we don’t have a lot of beds,” he said.
Pillay said there was adequate medical oxygen cylinders at hospitals to cope with the current high demand, amid a third wave, and they were constantly monitoring the flow and turnaround time to fill up these cylinders.
ELEDERLY INOCULATION DRIVE CONCERNS
Meanwhile, government said it was concerned about the slow uptake of elderly people to get their COVID19 vaccines with only 25% of this group inoculated so far.
Amid the third wave, government was hoping to jab about five million elderly people by Thursday, but only 50% of this targeted group has so far registered for a jab and only half of them have been reached so far. The government is hoping to improve this by solving the transport problems while also taking the vaccines to the elderly.
So far, the government has been vaccinating 85,000 people per day and is hoping to double this by inoculating as many as 200,000 people per day by the end of next month. However, the health department’s Nicholas Crisp said they were still battling with registration among the elderly in urban areas.
“In Limpopo, over 75% of the population over 60 has registered on the EDS system. This is a bit counterintuitive because we would have expected that populations who have greater access to digital technology and bandwidth would have registered more easily,” Crisp said.
He said they would also start increasing the vaccine science to enable more people to be vaccinated, alongside healthcare workers. People between 50 and 59 years old will be able to register on the government’s website for a COVID-19 Jab from Thursday.
-EWN
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