DA call for daily, detailed provincial Covid-19 stats
The Democratic Alliance’s (DA) Shadow Minister for Health, Siviwe Gwarube says the party’s health portfolio will be submitting Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) applications to all nine provincial health departments compelling them to release daily, detailed Covid-19 statistics.
LIMPOPO – “Of the nine provinces, only the Western Cape and Gauteng (although in a limited fashion) are releasing daily stats which are broken down into regions, fatalities and most importantly tests conducted,” he said.
Gwarube added that the party has repeatedly raised the issue of credible, consistent and accurate data which gives the country a complete picture of community transmissions in the fight against Covid-19, saying some provinces withhold data from the public for no reason at all.
“As an example of this absurdity, the KwaZulu Natal provincial government is claiming that these statistics are embargoed. Other provinces are either inconsistent in the sharing of this information or it does not happen at all.”
Gwarube says he has raised the issue of uniformity of data with the Minister of Health, Dr Zweli Mkhize, so South Africans are able to know how many tests are conducted per province and what proportion of the national testing figures they represent. “I have also made the case for transparency with regards to provincial testing strategies so that we can be assured that each province is testing enough people in relation to their population.”
He added that information about the global pandemic should never be considered classified as it goes against Section 32(1)(a) of the Constitution which determines that everyone has a right of access to any information held by the State. This is more so information relating to a global health crisis.
“The DA will continue fighting for this information to be made public so that we can ensure that we are not shooting in the dark. Every province must have a targeted approach to testing, tracing and tracking while meeting their daily testing targets. These PAIA applications will help us determine that in the next coming weeks.”
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