Article by Khanyi Moshia
South Africa is left with just over a week of the national lockdown but that isn’t as assuring because many people are wondering whether the lockdown will be extended or not.
With the increase in positive Covid-19 cases to 1845, and 5 more deaths, citizens are wondering whether life will resume in the next 8 days or not.
As at today, Wednesday the 8th of April 2020 at 20:22, Minister of Health Dr Zweli Mkhize released the new Covid-19 cases. This shows an increase of 96 new cases from the previously reported statistics.
Gauteng still has the highest number of cases at 782, followed by Western Cape at 495 and KwaZulu-Natal at 354. The other 6 provinces have reported less than 100 positive cases.
The Department of Health has increased their efforts to conduct more tests as they’ve tested 5678 tests compared to yesterday’s report – which brings the total number of tests conducted to date to 63 776.
Unfortunately, 5 new Covid-19 deaths have been reported too. St Augustine’s hospital in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal has been identified as the hotspot for the Coronavirus infections in the province, and according to Minister Mkhize, 66 people have tested positive and 48 of those people have been staff members.
“We have been worried about the hospital for a number of days now, the biggest issue is that the cases we got from there were not initially reported. These were cases that were admitted into the hospital without being tested properly for COVID-19 and they were tested for pneumonia without following proper protocol of testing for COVID-19.” – Nomagugu Simelane-Zulu, Health MEC – KwaZulu-Natal
Simelane-Zulu confirmed that the hospital has been closed down and all patients in the hospital will be tested for Covid-19, regardless of their reason of admission.
The Department of Health urges all patients who had been at the hospital from as early as the 1st of March 2020 to contact the KZN Health Department as soon as possible.
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