STATEMENT TO THE WESTERN CAPE PROVINCIAL PARLIAMENT BY
BRETT HERRON, GOOD MEMBER
4 JUNE 2020
COVID-19 SPREADS ON THE CAPE FLATS AS POSITIVE CASES ARE NOT BEING OFFERED SPACE IN PUBLIC ISOLATION FACILITIES.
Speaker, over the past few weeks I have been raising my concerns about the Western Cape’s rampant infection and death rate while two steps in the health protocols appeared to be poorly implemented.
While our testing ratio has been the highest in the country our community screening performance and our contact tracing results have been extremely weak.
The national health protocol for containing the rapid spread of the virus, and to save lives, has been:
Community Screening – Testing – Contact Tracing – Isolation and Quarantine.
Data presented by the National Minister of Health has shown that our community screening numbers have been the lowest in the country. Under-performing even the Northern Cape, in real terms, which has a fraction of our population.
That same data showed that at one stage we were tracing less than one contact per positive case.
I am encouraged to see the most recent data shows that our contact tracing is improving. If we have indeed ramped up to 63 000 contacts this means we are now tracing about 3.5 contacts per positive case. This is still inadequate but we are moving in the right direction.
However, this week I visited communities on the Cape Flats where community health care workers expressed frustration with our failure to offer those who test positive the opportunity to quarantine in a public facility.
Overcrowded living conditions make it impossible to self-isolate and our government should know that.
Healthcare workers advise that people who have tested positive in densely populated communities are not isolating because they cannot. Some are wandering around and some even going to work.
This government must implement the full health protocol – from start to finish – and the failure to offer those who cannot self-isolate the option to do so in a public facility is not acceptable.
We will not contain this virus and save lives if we are careless about the ability of every person to isolate or quarantine.