NC pandemic response requires greater transparency

28 July 2020

The following is an extract of a debate on the Northern Cape government’s Covid-19 response, that was delivered during a virtual House Sitting today.

The future that we are carving out for ourselves now, depends largely on individuals changing their long term behaviour and accepting personal responsibility for limiting the impact of the invisible Coronavirus on the health system, on society and on the economy.

On this note, I applaud everyone who has logged into this virtual House Sitting for implementing your own personal Covid-19 response by virtue of limiting unnecessary social interaction and ensuring social distancing. This is proof that we are able and willing to move forward and accept our new reality, which currently does not allow us to return to the ways of the past.

Hon. Speaker, it is undeniable that Covid-19 has impacted on every single aspect of our physical and emotional lives.

I say thank you to all frontline workers, who have selflessly risked their lives at a time when we knew so little about this virus.

The early lockdown did seem to put the brakes on the spread of the disease in the Northern Cape but unfortunately, despite a slow start in cases, numbers are now growing at a scary pace.

We know that we face an unprecedented crisis and looking back, we see that the initial lockdown was perhaps not used as effectively as it could have been to prepare the Northern Cape for the surge.

In the early days of the pandemic, we saw a lack of sanitisers, screeners and controls at facilities like Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe Hospital. In contrast, private facilities quickly implemented new protocols while state facilities lagged behind.

Up until last week, this province still did not have even one field hospital set up. I don’t know if this has changed since then?

Nonetheless, one thing stands out - the Northern Cape has to start taking the Covid-19 threat more seriously.
Hon. Speaker, while screening numbers in the Northern Cape quickly rose into hundreds of thousands, screening has meant little.

Numbers of positive Coronavirus cases stayed very low for a very long time. There was optimism that the province being largely cut off to international and inter-provincial travellers, had benefitted us.

Regrettably, however, this also seemed to create a sense of complacency in the Northern Cape government’s Covid-19 response and in the behaviour of our own citizens.

When cases suddenly started rising at a faster tempo, they were popping up all over the province. Single cases were identified in different municipalities, day after day.

Today, the conditions for testing are much stricter than they were initially, due to short supply of test kits on a national and global scale, coupled with a lack of laboratory capacity. And, as we look back now, we can see that, had the province instituted a more intensified early testing, tracking and tracing progamme back then, we may have been faced with a very different picture today.

Hon. Speaker, I fear this may prove to be the Northern Cape’s biggest downfall in its initial Covid-19 response.

Of the six mobile laboratories received from the NHLS, only two of them were actually equipped to perform rapid tests, which are anyway more similar to screening than testing.

Despite promises, mass testing therefore was simply never really on the cards for the province.

On this note, I call on the provincial government to be more open and honest about the possibility that, in the very near future, we may completely run out of test-kits and may have to go into a blind fight against this pandemic.

Hon. Speaker, a parliamentary reply earlier this year, revealed that the Northern Cape was allocated only 100 000 test kits.

As of today, according to the provincial health department’s daily statistic update, we see that approximately 50 000 tests have been done. If you do the maths, this means that we only have 50 000 left, unless of course the province’s stock has been replenished, which I doubt?

Perhaps the Premier or the MEC of Health can shed some light on this for us.

At the same time, they should shed some light on the laboratory capacity for the processing of Northern Cape tests.

Hon. Speaker, up until very recently, all our tests had to be sent to other provinces to be processed. We understand that testing has since commenced in the province, although we expect this to be limited. We also know there was initially a cap of 300 on the number of Northern Cape tests to be processed by the NHLS daily.

Today, 200 tests on average are coming back positive in the Northern Cape every day. Given the two-week doubling rate, it goes without saying that in 14 days’ time, we could be faced with a situation whereby 400 tests are coming back positive every day.

This begs the following questions.

How many tests can the laboratory actually process for the Northern Cape on a single day? Will it cope when more and more sick people require testing? And what is the provincial government doing to ensure that we don’t end up with test backlogs?

Hon. Speaker, there is no doubt that we still have many unanswered questions relating to provincial government’s pandemic response.

On this note, I must mention that during the early lockdown, the Health Department failed to respond to a PAIA application that I submitted, whereby I requested regular breakdowns of hospital admissions and bed usage, ICU placements and ventilator usage, amongst other things.

It is things like this, that have not inspired confidence in this department’s response.

Nonetheless, this department has since undergone a change in leadership and I sincerely hope that we will soon see the results thereof. This said, I hope that the type of information relating to bed capacity and ICU admissions, filters into the daily updates provided to the public. This is the type of information we need to assess whether hospitals are coping or becoming overwhelmed.

In the meantime, I also ask the MEC of Health to ensure that all Covid-19 disaster funds allocated to the health department are efficiently spent on the intended purpose, unlike past incidences.

We want the reassurance that money allocated for PPEs, expanded oxygen supplies and field hospitals, goes to the intended cause, as a matter of urgency.

We want the reassurance that the provincial health sector is indeed equipped to save as many lives as possible.

Hon. Speaker, while Health is at the forefront of this battle, the fight is a multi-sectoral one.

All departments have a critical role to play in terms of social relief, safety, infrastructure, water, sanitation and schooling.

At the same time, we are also undoubtedly facing a double crisis where already high levels of unemployment and poverty are set to balloon even further. Where hard working citizens like hairdressers, restaurant owners and waiters have lost their dignity and their ability to provide for their families.

We appreciate that fact that 39 of the 1501 SMMEs to have been assisted across the country, are from the Northern Cape. But we must be realistic and ask, was this really enough?

The economic response, and the responses of other departments, however, are topics for another day and another debate.

For now, however, I wish everyone God Speed as you head back out into the world.

Please work quickly to scale up the Northern Cape’s pandemic response. Please do more to save lives. And please do more to save livelihoods and restore dignity to those whose jobs and businesses have collapsed.

May you all stay safe and healthy and may no life, regardless of how sick or old it happens to be, be considered of less worth than any other life, as we fight this pandemic together.

Issued by Andrew Louw, DA Northern Cape Provincial Leader, 28 July 2020