Gauteng to move to level-3 lockdown, Mahkura says

Gauteng premier David Makhura has revealed that the province will move to level-3 lockdown restrictions at the beginning of June.

Responding to questions during the legislature’s first virtual house sitting on Tuesday, Makhura said the provincial government will be meeting with stakeholders to prepare for level 3 on Wednesday. “At the beginning of June, we are going to level 3 as Gauteng,” he said.

Makhura said the province would not go to level 3 in a disjointed way. “We cannot have a lockdown at this level for long. We are meeting with various sectors of the economy tomorrow. We want to move to level 3 in a more cautious way, balancing health and economic imperatives.

“We cannot have one municipality or metro in level 4 and other in level 3 or 2. The districts are highly integrated. We are going to level 3 together.”

Makhura said there was clear evidence that the establishment of the Command Council managed to slow down the spread of Covid-19. As a result, Gauteng now has less than 15% of confirmed cases of the virus in the country. The province would target townships as new confirmed cases come from there.

“In the next two months, a lot of our testing, tracing and isolating will be in the townships because we’re seeing that the suburbs have more recoveries as we speak now and fewer active cases; townships have new confirmed cases now. They’re still few, the rate of infection is low, the numbers are still low, but we know that Covid-19 spreads through cluster infection. We’re directing a lot of our resources there to test, trace, treat and isolate.

‘It is coming’

“We still have to climb the mountain of the peak. The peak is ahead of us, it may come in July or August or September. Various models suggest that it is coming. We’re ready for the worst of times in expanding the capacity of our health services by employing more health officials and building facilities. We have also been looking at the old Kempton Park hospital to see how we can utilise that,” he said.

The province will also be targeting the retail and public transport sectors to curb the spread of Covid-19.

• This article was originally published on Moneyweb and is used here with permission