Health
Question by:
Hon Wendy Philander
Answered by:
Hon Nomafrench Mbombo
Question Number:
17
Question Body:
(a) What are her Department’s plan or strategy regarding its readiness for a possible second wave of COVID-19 infections and (b) what are the deliverables of this plan or strategy?
Answer Body:
(a) The Department has been implementing a thorough surveillance system which allows the local health teams to hunt clusters of infections, through contact tracing, pattern identification and testing. It is this surveillance system which enabled the identification of cluster of infections.
(b) Our Surveillance system involves five steps to prevent community transmission of the virus.
- Heightened Vigilance: Each day the contact tracing team in the health districts receive a list of positive cases- drawn from our COVID-19 database.
- Identify patterns that suggest outbreaks: The case managers call each case and advise them to isolate. They will also ask additional questions to establish if they have attended a social gathering or where they work - trying to spot patterns.
- Confirm patterns using data and local knowledge: Once a pattern is spotted, the case managers will dig deeper. They will confirm the pattern looking at all available data sources.
- Activate a multisectoral response: Once the local outbreak is confirmed, the focused containment strategy is activated, and role-players are activated to manage the outbreak. A multisectoral response including Education, environmental health and others in the area was activated.
- Monitor for change: The contact tracing teams will then monitor the response to see if there are increases or decreases in the number of cases linked to the specific event.
Date:
Friday, October 23, 2020
