Tshwane District Hospital turned into a designated Covid-19 facility

Speaking during the Gauteng Provincial Command Council update briefing on the province’s approach to the Covid-19 pandemic, health MEC Bandile Masuku confirmed that his department had successfully decanted Tshwane District Hospital and turned it into a designated Covid-19 facility.

According to Masuku, the hospital had 240 beds and was ready for usage.

This is in addition to hospitals such as Kalafong Hospital, which the MEC confirmed was another facility that would be used in the fight against Covid-19.

A Kalafong employee recently contracted Covid-19 and has since recovered. She is said to be back and work and willing to speak to the public through the media about managing the virus.

This after hospitals in Duduza and Alexandra had to undergo a process of scrubbing and disinfection after being exposed to an infected individual among the hospital’s staff.

The department plans to “decant” Chris Hani Baragwanath and Charlotte Maxeke hospital in the same way as the Tshwane District Hospital.

Masuku confirmed that the province had two patients in the public sector in ICU whose conditions were said to be improving, one of whom was being treated at the Tshwane District Hospital. Private hospitals have five patients in ICU while the majority of the other patients are at home or in isolation wards.

While Masuku says the lockdown has helped immensely to reduce the rate of transmission, he believes that this is the calm before the storm, much like the warnings of the country’s health minister, Dr Zweli Mkhize.

“Hence we saw some sort of a plateau last week and when we test more in the community, we should get more of a spike,” he added.

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As such, Masuku believes various health departments need to ramp up screening of the country’s population in order to get a better idea of whom to test and cautioned against conflating screening with testing.

“Ordinarily, when we talk about testing we normally include screening in the whole process but I think for the purpose of us explaining better I think we need to say screening is one important aspect that leads to testing and it makes it easier for us to be able to identify a particular individual that needs to be tested.”

Masuku explained that aspects of screening such as determining a patient’s history of exposure to the virus, their symptoms, as well as who they have come into contact with, went a long way in assisting health workers to deal with each case as best they can.

“Screening makes it easier for us to identify individuals that need to be tested.”

The health MEC confirmed that the province was awaiting approval of rapid test kits from the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra) in order to expand on the mass screening that they launched in Alexandra about a week ago.

“We have already done close to 26,000 screens and we have tested more than 400 people and we are still hoping to do more. With a population of more than 15.2 million people in Gauteng, it means there is a lot more screening that needs to be done,” said Masuku.

Masuku also confirmed that provincial health workers have managed to trace all the contacts of Alexandra’s patient zero. They are in quarantine and are awaiting their results.

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