Surge in cases expected after violence

THE Health Department is anticipating a surge in Covid-19 numbers following the widespread riots and looting in Kwazulu-natal (KZN) and Gauteng last week.

Acting Health Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-ngubane was accompanied by KZN Health MEC Nomagugu Simelane to vaccination sites in Durban during her maiden visit to the province.

The visit was aimed at enabling the acting minister to get firsthand understanding of the province’s Covid-19 management and response plan as well as to inspect its ongoing vaccination programme.

Kubayi-ngubane said they were concerned about the recent unrest and its impact on the provincial health system. She said the surge response team, who were working in conjunction with the World Health Organization, had been activated in the province.

She pleaded with those who were involved in the protests and who started showing Covid-19 related symptoms to present themselves at a health-care facility to be tested.

Kubayi-ngubane also raised concerns about the damage to the health-care infrastructure and affect on the health-care system.

“People went and destroyed health-care facilities to the value of almost R2 million in various sites. Previously we have never had health-care facilities targeted and health-care workers stopped,” she said.

Simelane added that the number of unidentified bodies kept at the Phoenix Medico-legal Mortuary had increased to 57. She emphasised that while the mortuary may be close to full, it did not mean that all the bodies kept at the facility were related to deaths that occurred during the violent unrest in the province last week.

She said there were already 350 bodies at the Phoenix mortuary before the looting and riots.

The Phoenix mortuary is a new facility and currently the biggest in the province with a capacity of 500 shelves. The mortuary keeps bodies from across the province.

Simelane encouraged those with missing family members to visit the mortuary to identify the bodies.

Similane said that false information had been spreading through social media regarding the killings in Phoenix, and people needed to leave the police to investigate the killings.

“People did die in Phoenix and it’s a point we cannot run away from. We need to leave that particular element to the SAPS and security cluster, to identify and indicate how many died in relation to the unrest. There are people who were targeted, we can’t run away from that,” she said.