The Western Cape department of health has put itself on alert over Covid-19 after an uptick in the the average proportion of positive cases.
“We need to keep the reproduction number under one.”
“And it has just gone above that — this puts us on alert,” he said at a press conference on Thursday.
The reproduction rate is the number of new cases arising from each infectious case.
Cloete indicated that markers like hospitalisations, deaths and oxygen use are “stable” with the province recording 120 new cases per day, 25 hospitalisations and three deaths.
“What concerns us is that the average proportion of positive cases has gone up by 5% since the beginning of May,” he said.
The private sector was showing higher proportions of positive cases, with particular pockets in the metro and “affluent suburbs” being more prominent.
Cloete also said that data from surveillance teams “on the ground” shows that bowling clubs in the Tygerberg district had been earmarked as sites of rises in cases and that this was a “new phenomenon”.
Wastewater studied by the Medical Research Council also indicated that detectable SARS-CoV-2 are the highest they have been this year in Mitchells Plain.
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