Gauteng doing well, but has to speed up virus test results – DA

Gauteng may be leading the fight against Covid-19 in terms of preparedness, opposition parties suggest.

But concerns over the swift collection of data threatened to undermine progress made in increasing the rate of testing in two of the most beleaguered provinces in the coronavirus pandemic.

Democratic Alliance (DA) MPL and Gauteng shadow health MEC Jack Bloom said the province had made positive strides in preparing for the expected peak of Covid-19 cases, although concerns around testing remained.

“The main thing with Gauteng is we don’t know what the real picture is when it comes to testing results which are so delayed.

“We cannot get an active picture of what is really going on until we start to see more results,” said Bloom.

According to the latest statistics from the Gauteng health department, the province still had the second-highest number of cases.

With at least 8,000 extra beds in health facilities across the province, government was making good on its promise to increase capacity, Bloom said, but poor handling and collection of crucial data would render the province unprepared when the peak hit in about June.

“The big mystery in Gauteng – and I have sent questions which hopefully will be answered this week – is that there are 127,000 tests that have been done so far, but how many of those tests actually have results out so far?

“There is a big difference between how many tests have been done and how many of those tests we have the results of. We are averaging about 4,000 tests per day … and we should be at about 10,000 tests per day if we were going at a fast enough rate.”

He said the Western Cape, where the most cases were currently being reported, had the unique challenge of having a high number of international visitors, which may be behind the sudden spike in positive test results.

He argued that the DA-led provincial government had conducted more tests per capita than Gauteng, despite the latter having a larger population.

Western Cape opposition, the Good Party, was critical of the DA-led government’s ratio of cases recorded to contacts traced. The province accounted for more cases and deaths from Covid-19 than all the other eight provinces combined.

On Monday, Dr M Moodley, head of the Western Cape department of health, said the province’s infection rates suggested “earlier onset of rapid exponential growth in hospitalisation and death than initially considered at the onset of lockdown”, according to Good Party spokesperson Brett Herron.

The party questioned Western Cape Premier Alan Winde’s call for the province to be moved from level 4 to level 3 of the lockdown when there was “no health or science data” to support this call.

“We deserve to know how Gauteng, with less than half the number of cases than the Western Cape, has managed to trace more contacts,” said Herron.

The province reportedly traced 11,181 contacts for its 804 cases. This meant the Western Cape was tracing just 1.3 contacts per case, Herron pointed out.

“Comparatively, in Gauteng, last week 9,600 contacts had been traced for their 2,262 cases – more than 4.2 contacts per case; and in KwaZulu-Natal, a fortnight ago, the contacts per case ratio was 2.8 (3,131 contacts traced for 1,106 cases).”

– simnikiweh@citizen.co.za

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