President Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the nation at 20h00 on Thursday evening 23 July 2020 on the risk-adjusted strategy to manage the spread of COVID-19
Tag: covid-19
The goal of the system would have been to determine the location and movement of positive cases.
The national health department looked at the feasibility of a surveillance system that could track the movement of citizens to help it fight Covid-19, but it didn’t work out, a national official revealed to Western Cape MPLs.
“There was an attempt to develop a system to allow us to do that, however technical complexities and privacy concerns, and the protection of that, moved us towards active contact tracing,” said the department’s chief director of policy coordination and integrated planning Milani Wolmarans.
Wolmarans was briefing the Western Cape legislature’s ad hoc committee on Covid-19 on Friday.
The committee had been concerned about the privacy of individuals and whether their rights were being protected.
Between 17 April and 14 May, the department had worked on developing a proof of concept to see whether it would be possible to establish a surveillance system using data provided by mobile network operators.
The goal of the system would have been to determine the location and movement of positive cases, as well as how many people had been in close contact with them, said Wolmarans.
‘RICA info has also got its difficulties’
But based on the technology available in South Africa and the volumes of cases expected, it would have taken days for the department to get that information.
This made the information null and void.
She said it was difficult to get a person’s location and even more difficult to track their movement, as this information needed to come from cellphone towers.
“It was complex to get within a two-metre radius of an individual. In most of the rural areas, it would have been 100m, and within some of the peri-urban areas, it would have been 50m.
“RICA info has also got its difficulties.”
She said some people who took out cellphone contracts had given their phones to other people, so the contract address was not the same as the address of the user.
It might also happen that a person’s phone was temporarily in another person’s possession.
Wolmarans said they presented their strict protocols on data collection to Covid-19 Judge Kate O’Reagan.
“According to my knowledge, there was no breach or leak and the data was totally encrypted.”
The database had since been destroyed, leaving only names and contact numbers.
A digital contact tracing system was currently operational in all provinces and would soon be launched by the health minister, said Wolmarans.
The system is automated and uses machine learning and chat bots.
A person gets an SMS asking if they would like to receive their test results. If positive, a chat bot asks the individual to share the details of people they have been in contact with in the last seven to 10 days.
“The key is… to inform citizens that if they get a specific message, it’s not a hoax but a real message and they should react.”
Quoted from Source : https://citizen.co.za/news/covid-19/2324008/sa-looked-at-covid-19-cellphone-tracking-but-it-proved-too-complex-health-dept/
Explained: What a pulse oximeter is and how it works
BY TANYA FARBER
Image: Jozef Polc/123rf.com
One of SA’s top Covid-19 experts has advised South Africans to “seek help immediately” if they have chest pains and shortness of breath.
“The main symptoms of low oxygen are chest pain and difficulty with breathing,” explains Professor Shabir Madhi, who is on the Covid-19 advisory council to the department of health and is head of the vaccine trials in the country.
He adds that “dizziness” follows as one fails to get enough oxygen to the brain.
He said people should “seek assistance immediately” if they are experiencing “chest pains, shortness of breath, lightheadedness or confusion”, as these are all “telltale signs that your oxygen levels are not adequate”.
Rapid breathing is also a sign.
“If you are taking more than 20 breaths per minute, then you need to receive oxygen,” he told TimesLIVE.
He said it is “difficult to quantify” if many South Africans are failing to seek help when they should, but suspected that “some are delaying seeking care because they’re too afraid of what might happen”.
Across the globe, between 12% to 14% of those who are hospitalised lose their lives and, says Prof Madhi, “South Africa is in the same ballpark figures of what has been observed in other countries”.
Apart from monitoring these symptoms, another way to check oxygen levels is with a pulse oximeter, but these are not readily available to the public in South Africa.
“A pulse oximeter is good to have but they aren’t readily available,” said Madhi. “It’s a medical device so very few pharmacists will have it. But, the symptoms on their own will tell you if you need oxygen.”
It’s a small device that clips onto your finger and measures your oxygen saturation levels, and outside of hospitals, one is most likely to see them in an ambulance or a nursing home.
You need to “make sure your hands are warm” while using one, says Madhi.
Nail polish can also interfere with the readings, so the device should be used without any.
“Your saturation should be above 95,” says Prof Madhi, “if it is under 93 you need to get oxygen.”
While the public may also attempt to measure their own oxygen with smartphone apps or fitness trackers, a British general practitioner, Ann Robinson told The Guardian, “There is no evidence to say that smartphone apps or fitness trackers are accurate enough for this purpose.”
In a small percentage of Covid-19 cases, a person can suffer from what’s known as silent hypoxia — where there is no way of knowing that oxygen levels have dropped to very dangerous levels.
This was first reported in Chinese studies but there was no indication of how commonly this occurs.
Cases then showed up in Europe and the UK.
A letter to the British Journal of Anaesthesia suggests that silent hypoxaemia could result from one’s oxygen and carbon dioxide being low, because if only your oxygen is low, it is high blood carbon dioxide that usually causes breathlessness.
Image: Supplied/Wits
The WHO advises that if you have minor symptoms, such as only a slight cough or a mild fever, “there is generally no need to seek medical care”. It advises such people to stay at home, monitor their symptoms, and follow national guidance on self-isolation.
The WHO advises that people get medical attention immediately if they have any breathing difficulties or pain or pressure in the chest.
Quoted from source : https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2020-07-15-how-to-know-when-you-need-a-hospital-for-covid-19/
Ferial Haffajee – From Daily Maverick
Covid-19’s devastation has seen three million people lose their incomes. And almost half of all households report going hungry in the past three months, a heart-stopping new survey reveals.
On 27 March, the hard lockdown was declared to try to hold off the spread of the Covid-19 virus – and almost immediately the bottom fell out of South Africa.
In less than a month, three million South Africans had lost their incomes and jobs, turning hunger from a problem to a crisis.
A household survey out on 15 July reveals that there was an almost immediate net loss of three million jobs between February and April and women accounted for two million of the people who lost their livelihoods as the economy was shut down.
“Forty-seven percent of respondents reported that their household ran out of money to buy food in April 2020. Prior to the lockdown, 21% of households reported that they ran out of money to buy food in the previous year (according to StatsSA’s General Household Survey of 2018).
A survey published on 15 July has for the first time revealed the triple pandemic that has blown South Africa down with viral force. Led by principal investigator Dr Nic Spaull, this National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey is the first authoritative measure of the impact of Covid-19 on jobs, hunger and poverty.
“The impact is colossal and it shocked us,” said Spaull in an interview with Daily Maverick. Spaull has worked with the country’s top-rated researchers and economists including Haroon Bhorat, Reza Daniels, Murray Leibbrandt, and Servaas van der Berg.
“All of us were numbed. It is devastating and upsetting,” said Spaull.
The big picture – majority of South Africans out of work
The researchers undertook work of enormous thought leadership to explore the impacts – there are 11 papers out.
“The 11 papers revealed that there is a high degree of agreement between researchers on what the key findings are: that employment has declined substantially and that the effects of this are largest for the most disadvantaged. Inequalities along traditional lines of race, gender, occupation, earnings, location and education have all grown significantly. An already unequal national situation has been made much worse.
“One in three income earners in February did not earn an income in April,” which translated into an almost immediate job loss when lockdown was declared.
Professor Reza Daniels and Professor Vimal Ranchhod of UCT School of Economics found that the proportion of adults who earned an income in February declined by 33%, which is made up of a roughly equal share of those who lost their jobs and were furloughed (put on unpaid leave when businesses closed).
This is already a shocker of a number but if you overlay it onto South Africa’s already endemic unemployed, what it means is that more South Africans are unemployed and without any income than those who are working.
And Covid-19 has widened the gulf of inequality in South Africa.
“The overarching finding from this analysis is that the job losses were not uniformly distributed amongst the different groups. In particular, groups who have always been more vulnerable, such as women, African/Blacks, youth and less educated groups have been disproportionately negatively affected,” write Ranchhod and Daniels.
Women hold up half the sky until it falls down
In South Africa, women keep the country going. The typical household in our country is that of the single working mother with children. Covid-19 cut hard but its scythe sliced women’s ability to work and feed their children with an even greater cruelty.
“Women have been more severely affected than men in the early phase of the crisis in South Africa, namely the ‘hard’ lockdown period. Net job losses were higher for women than men with women accounting for two-thirds of the total net job losses. Among those who remained in employment, there was also a bigger fall in average hours worked per week for women than men,” report Daniela Casale and Dorrit Posel of Wits University in the NIDS-CRAM study.
National income studies have long revealed that women across the value chain earn less than men and that the gendered labour market also means that women lost their jobs more quickly as companies shut down in the hard lockdown phase. There are a lot of numbers here, but it’s a vital understanding of how women were impacted.
“In February 2020, or pre-crisis, 46% of women and 59% of men aged 18 and older reported being employed. In April 2020, or the month of the ‘hard’ lockdown, 36% of women and 54% of men reported being employed (or having a job to return to). This amounts to a 22% decline in the share of women employed compared to a 10% decline in the share of men employed between February and April. The gender gap in employment has therefore grown,” report Casale and Posel.
Not to be sensationalist, but this is a disaster for women’s empowerment as it will push women out of the jobs market and down the ladder after decades of incremental improvement.
“Of the approximately 2.9 million net job losses that occurred between February and April among all adults aged 18 and older, women accounted for two-thirds.”
Like most African economies, the informal economy (fruit and vegetable sellers, vetkoek aunties, roadside hot food stalls) is a vital part of the economy. “A larger share of the informal economy relative to formal employment were locked out of employment during April,” the survey says.
In studies of how unpaid work grew as the lockdown extended for months and months, researchers also found that unpaid care work went up substantially by at least four additional hours a day.
Because women head most households, the duty of care for children, and of home-schooling, fell to them. If Covid-19’s impacts have a face, then it is that of the African women.
I am hungry
Most South African homes stay afloat on a mixture of grant and jobs incomes (through jobs in the informal sector or the bottom rungs of the jobs market).
With that gone – in what economists call “income shocks” – people could not put food on the table, as Maverick Citizen has reported throughout the pandemic’s course through South Africa.
Now the survey shows how hard hunger hit. “Forty-seven percent of respondents reported that their household ran out of money to buy food in April 2020… it seems quite clear that the incidence of running out of money to buy food has doubled.
“One in five respondents reported that someone in their household went hungry in the last seven days, and 1-in-7 reported that a child had gone hungry in the last seven days.”
The survey was taken before relief measures and community action networks got into gear, but it does show the utter desperation that the Covid-19 outbreak has carried in its wake.
“In households that experienced hunger in the last seven days, 42% managed to shield children from that hunger,” the survey reveals.
What it paints is a Dickensian picture of adults going without food to ensure that the children have some: “Far too many people, and far too many children, are going hungry,” says the NIDS-CRAM survey.
A month into lockdown, the government announced the first tranche of its relief package as the devastation was clear almost immediately. Even though South Africa’s social solidarity relief net through which 19-million grants are paid every month is unusual in the developing world, it did not touch sides as the lockdown deepened.
This is because poor South Africans knit together a crochet of survivalist strategies that include incomes and grants.
“The possibility of job loss or a downturn in business presented a major threat to the livelihoods of a large proportion of grant-receiving households because, pre-lockdown, many rely on sources of income other than grants.”
Relief and solidarity
Government stepped in and so did significant social solidarity systems like the Solidarity Fund.
While the survey measured the first month of lockdown, further waves of research will keep track of the impacts.
“The social sector and communities have engaged rigorously in relief efforts. During lockdown, 18% of adults reported accessing support for food or shelter from government (8%), NGO’s, churches or other associations (6%) or neighbours and the community (9%).
The survey has confirmed what many reports have shown: the UIF system is a mangle. “Urgent attention needs to be given to rectifying technical glitches that exist in the UIF system,” says the survey, which found that only 20% of those surveyed who were eligible for the temporary employment relief (TERS) payment received it. The social relief of distress grant (SRD) could be a nifty tactic to get money into homes gnawed by hunger, but at the time of the survey it had not worked smoothly: of about six million applicants, just under one million had received the R350 grant at the time of the survey.
Government is mulling a permanent basic income grant and this is universally confirmed by the researchers as the best method of preventing a fall into extreme poverty by more South Africans.
“Global poverty projections suggest that the international response to the virus will push over 70 million people into extreme poverty, with sub-Saharan Africa being hardest hit,” says the survey.
All 11 research reports will be publicly available here at noon on 15 July.
The project is a telephone survey of 7,000 households that is recognised as nationally representative. It will continue over five “waves”. DM
Quoted Direct from Source : https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-07-15-the-day-the-bottom-fell-out-of-south-africa-a-triple-pandemic-has-hit-us
Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has published a directive which outline South Africa’s new lockdown rules.
The directive comes after president Cyril Ramaphosa announced the reintroduction of new lockdown restrictions on Sunday evening (12 July), as the country faces a surge in coronavirus cases.
“The storm is upon us,” the president said. “More than a quarter of a million South Africans have been infected with coronavirus, and we know that many more infections have gone undetected.”
“The coronavirus storm is far fiercer and more destructive than any we have known before. It is stretching our resources and our resolve to their limits.”
President Ramaphosa said that the surge of infections that experts and scientists predicted over three months ago has now arrived. According to current projections, each of our provinces will reach the peak of infections at different times between the end of July and late September, he said.
“We are focusing on a number of priority actions in the coming weeks,” he said.
You can read the updated lockdown rules below. Alternatively, you can read the full directive here.
Masks
The wearing of a cloth face mask, a homemade item, or another appropriate item that covers the nose and mouth is mandatory for every person when in a public place.
In addition, if not wearing a mask, no person will be allowed to:
- Use, operate, perform any service on any form of public transport;
- Enter or be in a building, place or premises, including government buildings, places or premises, used by the public to obtain goods or services; or
- Be in any public open space.
The above does not apply to a person who undertakes ‘vigorous exercise’ in a public place, provided that the person maintains a distance of at least three metres from any other person, and subject to directions on what is considered to be ‘vigorous’ by the Health minister.
Inline with existing regulations, an employer must provide every employee with a cloth face mask, homemade item, or another appropriate item that covers the nose and mouth, when in the workplace.
In addition, an employer may not allow any employee to perform any duties or enter the employment premises if the employee is not wearing an appropriate item.
Public transport drivers, managers, owners of buildings, and employers who do not enforce the above regulations will be liable to either a fine or six months imprisonment or both.
Curfew and liquor
Every person is confined to his or her place of residence from 21h00 until 04h00 daily, except where a person has been granted a permit.
The sale, dispensing and distribution of liquor is now also prohibited with immediate effect.
The transportation of liquor is prohibited, except where the transportation of liquor is:
- In relation to alcohol required for industries producing hand sanitizers, disinfectants, soap or alcohol for industrial use and household cleaning products;
- For export purposes; or
- From manufacturing plants to storage facilities.
The directive also states that no special or events liquor licenses may be considered for approval during the duration of the national state of disaster.
Transport
The directive states that bus and taxi services may operate under the following conditions:
- They may not carry more than 70% of the licensed capacity for long-distance intra- provincial and permitted inter-provincial travel;
- They may carry 100% of the licensed capacity for any trip not regarded as long-distance travel.
The directive defines long-distance travel as a trip of 200 km or more whether the travel is within a province or interprovincial.
A driver, owner or operator of public transport may not allow any member of the public not wearing a cloth face mask, homemade item, or another appropriate item that covers the nose and mouth, to board or be conveyed in public transport owned or operated by him or her.
Cigarettes and tobacco
The directive states that:
- The sale of tobacco, tobacco products, e-cigarettes and related products to members of the public and to persons including retailers who sell directly to the members of the public, is prohibited;
- The sale of tobacco, tobacco products, e-cigarettes and related products for export, is permitted;
- The sale of tobacco from farmers to local processors or local manufacturers, and from processors to manufacturers, is permitted.
Taken and quoted as is in whole from source : https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/415519/here-are-south-africas-new-lockdown-regulations-including-the-rules-around-masks/