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Actress Lesego Chabedi joins Covid-eo cast Page 12
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Nkosi sikelel’ iSA House-to-house screening begins as experts warn about false picture of crisis
BIG ST STORY
By GRAEME HOSKEN, LWANDILE BHENGU and QAANITAH HUNTER
● Brace yourselves, SA. Halfway through a 21-day lockdown, the country is fixated on daily new infection levels as it prepares for a possible Covid-19 spike that many fear could overwhelm the country’s health services. House-to-house screening and testing kicked off yesterday with a pilot programme involving more than 200 households in Umlazi, Durban, but health experts warned about SA’s slow start to testing and a shortage of key protective equipment. The warnings come after health minister Zweli Mkhize said this week that the lower levels of infections reported over the past several days could be the lull before the storm, and that hundreds of thousands of tests need to be conducted. Also this week, the government was finalising a plan to move thousands of people out of high-density areas, and health workers’ union Nehawu launched a court action against the health department to compel it to provide sufficient protective gear for health workers. This follows news that the US recorded about 1,300 new coronavirus deaths between Thursday and Friday — the highest single-day death toll reported by any country. With 1,505 infections and nine deaths, South Africans have been warned not to let down their guard, as the virus takes hold in overcrowded townships, where social distancing and lockdown regulations are difficult to enforce. In Umlazi Q section, KwaZulu-Natal health MEC Nomagugu Simelane-Zulu and a team of health officials were out in full force on a screening drive yesterday. Seven groups of screening teams and testers were sent to households to screen families. Simelane-Zulu said that the target was for each group to visit 30 homes by the end of the day. “Today we decided to bring out our screening teams and tracer teams in order to pilot the mass screening and understand what needs to be done. I must indicate that it is not everybody that is going to be tested. Everybody is going to be screened and the screening is going to determine who needs to be tested, ” she said. Simelane-Zulu said premier Sihle Zikalala would launch the province’s home screening and testing drive this week. A health department community screening and testing programme is set to be rolled out nationally, with the launch of mobile units fitted with specialised equipment used for TB testing. But Medical Research Council vaccinologist professor Shabir Madhi warned that this TB testing equipment is no “magic bullet” that will save SA from a Covid-19 crisis.
Linda-Gail Bekker
Community hostility adds to corona distress
Health workers arrive to disinfect Madala hostel in Alexandra, Johannesburg. This week SA will pass the halfway mark of its 21-day lockdown introduced in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Now, say experts, urgent attention must be given to mass testing to give the country a fighting chance of tackling the crisis. Picture: Alon Skuy
Madhi said the National Health Laboratory Services (NHLS) rather needed to explain why only 11 of its more than 230 labs are being used for Covid-19 testing and what it is doing to secure supplies to ramp up mass testing of 35,000 people a day. “I fear, because of testing kit and material shortages, SA will be on a similar or worse infection trajectory as Spain and Italy. “Urgent mass community testing is needed but cannot happen because SA is woefully incapacitated by a lack of test kits and materials, “which now take 10 days to import”. “For us to detect who is infected and isolate them and quarantine their contacts, at least 30,000 daily tests must be conducted. Government cannot properly implement its isolation and quarantine strategies without knowing who’s actually infected, which is critical to this fight.” He said the NHLS should have properly planned for Covid-19 infection testing when the National Institute for Communicable
Diseases (NICD) started surveillance of the virus in January. Madhi said even though the health department is scaling up testing, mass testing is only likely to happen in May, which “is too late as the country will be dealing with the worst part of the pandemic”. He suggested university laboratories be used to increase daily testing capacity. “These labs could easily do 5,000 daily tests collectively.” Professor Mosa Moshabela, dean of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Nursing and Public Health, said its labs were ready to assist. He said that with the virus now in townships it has moved into new populations and communities. “From modelling we believe that while only 1,505 people are known to be infected, the actual number is 4,000. It’s estimated that by May 6 there will be over 100,000 infections.” He said the evolution of the Covid-19
spread would change the dynamics of how cases are detected. “The moment it spreads to people who cannot access health care, the detection rate dramatically slows down.” The head of the NHLS, Dr Kamy Chetty, said it is not SA’s fault that new tests for Covid-19 have not been rolled out yet. She has set up a “war room situation” to negotiate with suppliers, fast-track the delivery of essential items and assist smaller suppliers in SA, to ramp up testing. “We order test kits and then it doesn’t come in. It gets postponed. The flight gets cancelled. It is a huge challenge. The other challenge is the fact that the whole world is competing for the same products. We are dealing with suppliers throughout the world. It is very difficult. The team sits here in a war room-style situation phoning suppliers. We have to find creative ways [to deal with the crises],” she said. “From an operational point of view, the
NHLS has had to work extremely fast to capacitate itself,” Chetty said. She said the fact that the NHLS is in a stable financial situation, moving from a R1.4bn deficit in 2017 to a R1.8bn excess in 2020, made it easier to respond to crises. Mkhize said that of 50,219 tests conducted, the NHLS has done about 6,000, with private laboratories conducting the rest. The government is pinning much of its hopes on a TB testing machine, which can be used to detect Covid-19. Mohammed Majam, Wits University’s health consortium’s Ezintsha division medical technologies head, said SA is better geared than most countries to test for Covid19 because of the country’s HIV/TB problems. “SA has about 2,000 GeneXpert machines, used for TB testing, which can be used for Covid-19 testing. While the current To Page 2 ➜
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The stigma that attached itself to HIV/Aids patients is back, but this time the targets are people with Covid-19. Families in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal told the Sunday Times this week that they had faced hostility after their relatives tested positive for the coronavirus that causes the disease. In Khayelitsha, rumours spread that a 25-year-old mother who was the first confirmed person with the virus in Cape Town’s largest township had been paid “to spread the virus”. Infectious disease experts said stigmatising the coronavirus and Covid19 could fuel its spread because people would try to conceal their condition. “Stigma drives people underground, affects their mental wellbeing and makes our efforts to reach, test and treat everyone so much harder,” said LindaGail Bekker, head of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the University of Cape Town. Page 10
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