As Gauteng, SA’s economic powerhouse, scrambles to strengthen a health-care system that has been found wanting by a surge of Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations, President Cyril Ramaphosa has hinted at new curbs to stem the tide.
“Infections are rising and that calls on us to review where we are. We will be making an assessment,” Ramaphosa said on Tuesday during a media briefing in Cape Town. “There seem to be indications that we need to increase the measures, particularly in Gauteng.”
Just a week after moving the country’s lockdown level up by one notch but avoiding severe restrictions such as a complete ban on alcohol sales as recommended by scientific advisers, Ramaphosa also hinted that he would be mindful to avoid an economically damaging lockdown, saying the country needs “to find a balance between saving lives and livelihoods”.
A week ago, Ramaphosa moved SA back to level 3 lockdown, lengthening the night-time curfew by an hour, reducing the number of people allowed to gather and restricting alcohol sales, resisting proposals from the national command council, the body of cabinet ministers set up to consider advice from experts and advise the cabinet, for stronger measures.
Since then the number of cases has surged, with Gauteng accounting for more than two-thirds of new cases. Gauteng had a record 8,640 cases on Sunday. For the country as a whole, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases on Tuesday recorded 11,093 new cases for the previous 24 hours. Gauteng had 7,471, or 67%, of the total. No other province breached 1,000, with the Western Cape second on 847 cases.
Doctors reported a shortage of beds and oxygen, while Gauteng premier David Makhura said the province could run out of beds in seven days.
Despite Ramaphosa’s hint that there could be more restrictions ahead, the government seems to have taken a wait-and-see approach, with some health experts saying the effect of restrictions announced last week would be felt in coming days. Business Day understands that an interministerial committee meeting scheduled for Thursday will now concentrate on the arrival of the next batch of vaccines.
Bruce Mellado, head of the Gauteng government’s Covid-19 medical advisory committee, told Business Day members acknowledged that tightening restrictions should be a last resort. “This is a complex balancing act between managing the pandemic and impacting people’s livelihoods.”
A decision was made to postpone making new recommendations for now.
“We have seen that the level 2 restrictions have not had [a] strong impact on the pandemic,” he said. “We will see what the impact of level 3 is at the end of this week.”
Despite having navigated the first and second waves relatively well, Gauteng has this time been left struggling with a shortage of beds and staff. The provincial administration said it had contracted 5,000 additional health-care workers and 1,100 more beds. With one of the government’s flagship public hospitals, Charlotte Maxeke, still closed after a fire in April, Chris Hani Baragwanath will take on 500 ICU beds.
Makhura met with health-care experts and hospital bosses on Tuesday to ascertain what more could be done, with Gauteng struggling to cope with a rate for infections, hospitalisations and deaths that is double the national rate.
Insiders say the focus of Gauteng’s provincial command council was on how to manage a fresh surge in new infections, which health experts project will land in the first week of July. Business Day understands that there were still debates about whether to recommend stricter restrictions, with some members saying it was “better late than never”.
After shutting down the economy in 2020, pushing SA into its deepest economic slump in a century and sacrificing more than 1-million jobs, the government has sought to be more pragmatic with recent waves of the pandemic.
It is also struggling with a fiscal position that means it does not have resources to support businesses that are forced to shut or workers who lose their wages.
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