According to information gathered independently by the Democratic Alliance (DA) only 7 697 (3%) out of nearly 5 million Mpumalanga residents have been tested for Covid-19. This is not enough to curb and manage the potential spread of Covid-19. With this slow pace of testing, this virus may spread unnoticed and become unmanageable.
Concerned residents have been calling for provincial health MEC, Sasekani Manzini to reveal how many people have been tested for Covid-19 in Mpumalanga, but to date the MEC has not revealed this information to the public. The DA is currently, through a PAIA (Promotion of Access to Information Act) application attempting to compel the MEC to release this information on a daily basis.
Public Health specialists have come out saying that it is now time to move from surveillance of the virus to active case finding and focusing on the hotspot areas, which means intervening in the clusters where the disease has shown to be problematic.
This change of strategy is necessary as the community screening process has not yielded the detection of cases as expected.
Once again, the DA appeals to Health MEC, Sasekani Manzini and the department to increase the drive to test more residents in Mpumalanga.
Mpumalanga is the only province that doesn’t publish Provincial Covid-19 stats daily. By keeping residents in the dark, you leave room for speculation which often result in fake news being spread around.
The National Health Department releases daily statistics that are broken down into province, fatalities and most importantly tests conducted. So far the Western Cape conducts over 4000 Covid-19 tests daily, and over 20 000 tests have been conducted since the end of April; hence the high number of positive cases.
By May 12, Mpumalanga had reported 63 positive cases of Covid-19 with 24 recoveries.