Cape Town - With the number of Covid-19 cases rising in the Western Cape, the provincial Department of Health said it was mainly concerned with the well-being of health workers.
The department briefed Parliament’s portfolio committee on co-operative governance and traditional affairs on Tuesday evening with a 113-slide presentation.
Western Cape Health Department head Dr Keith Cloete said: “We remain seriously concerned about safety of health workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. There are very high levels of anxiety and fear among staff, including their families.”
Cloete said the department was engaging with the Department of Labour. “It will significantly impact on the capacity of the health platform to provide services - cases and close contacts have to be in isolation and quarantine for 14 days unless tested negative,” he said.
Cloete said they had developed a number of interventions to protect staff. “We have developed multiple policies, tools implementations, training, occupational health expertise and organised labour. We meet weekly as a chamber and spend hours with our colleagues to build relationships so that they work with us at institutional levels,” he said.
The department told the committee that from June 18, the number of cases of health-care workers who were infected was 2560, which is about 6% of the total cases in the Western Cape. At the time, 729 of those were active. The number of deaths among health workers was 22.
Cloete said that the department had identified high-flow nasal oxygen as an alternative to ventilators. “If you do high-flow oxygen you don’t need a ventilator. We have done the required demand projection for oxygen supply. We need to work together because there will be a national demand for this,” he said.
Premier Alan Winde said: “We really feel this war upfront. We learned from other parts of the world on how to deal with this pandemic. We are slowly going into our peak and we are seeing our numbers increasing.”
The department also provided an update on its facilities to the committee, it said.
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