Health
On 19 May 2020 the national Minister of Health released statistics on the coronavirus pandemic:
As at 14 May 2020 the Western Cape had done the lowest number of community screenings of any province in the country, namely 404 143:
1. (a) Why are the Western Cape’s community-screening results lower than any other province and (b) how has the Western Cape been implementing community screening;
2. whether the Western Cape has implemented any measures to increase the community-screening performance; if so, what are the relevant details;
3 (a) what is the current number of community screenings being done in the province and (b) what is the referral rate?
1.With the advent of the Community Screening and Testing (CST) programme, community transmission has already been established in the Cape Metro, on account of earlier community seeding in late March 2020 (prior to the National lockdown). Consequently, the introduction of CST coincided with the discovery of clusters of cases in the Cape Metro, especially in retail supermarkets and factories, where essential workers reported for duty. With the implementation of CST, the province therefore opted to target its screening resources to where there were known positive cases of COVID-19, with the clear purpose of finding new cases linked to existing cases, and hence slowing person to person spread. This was a targeted approach, in line with the national recommendation to target clusters of positive cases and focus screening activity in those clusters. There was specific attention paid the developing clusters in essential services sectors. This decision was aimed at the most effective and targeted use of human and testing resources for that particular phase of the pandemic.
Screening and testing activities were also directed according to the case NICD protocol and case definition at the time. The case definition at the time specified that criteria for testing would include people who had travelled outside of South Africa since the 1st February 2020 or had contact with someone who is COVID-19 positive case; symptoms screened included people who were exhibiting any 2 of the following symptoms were referred for testing: fever, cough, sore throat, shortness of breath, myalgia / general weakness, loss of taste or loss of sense of smell. Thus the province followed national protocol at that time.
In the Cape Metro, where community transmission was established relatively early, specific effort was put into screening activity around essential services clusters (which have been permitted to operate under all levels of lockdown), care homes and in geographical areas where people who work in these clusters live and this has mostly been in the most vulnerable communities in Cape Town. Our hotspot intervention strategy continues our combined efforts in these targeted areas with the focus to protect vulnerable people who are at high risk, and to prevent deaths.
In the Rural areas of the province community screening activity is still actively pursued as part of the containment and suppression strategy.
3. As at 29 June 2020, 832 009 screenings have been conducted of which 16 235 people have been referred for testing.
