Trade and Industry Minister Ebrahim Patel says the nationwide lockdown has given government and the health sector time to prepare and also build up stocks in order to combat the increase in coronavirus infections.
Briefing the media in Pretoria on Thursday, Patel says local manufacturing has also benefitted in manufacturing Personal Protective Equipment.
He says, “The time has been used to upgrade systems in hospitals, to build additional field hospitals, expand the number of beds that are available and very important to train staff. The second thing we’ve been able to do is to build up the stocks of critical healthcare and PPEs, surgical masks, hand sanitisers, surgical gowns, and ventilators. Some of this we had to import from other parts of the world while we got our factories ready to get production going in South Africa and we’ve ramped up production very significantly.”
Implementation of Level-3 is scientific
In the same briefing, Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma assured South Africans that the implementation of alert of the nationwide lockdown from June 1 has been determined through scientific advice from experts.
Dlamini-Zuma said this is intended to re-open economic activity in order to have a viable economy.
She said, “These next phases and of Level-3, allow us to open all the productive areas of our economy, all, be it to a moderate degree in some hot spots areas. This risk level, thanks to the employ of a risk-adjusted approach, allows us to maintain the delicate balancing act between one, saving lives and the other saving the livelihoods of South Africans.”
More details of Level-3 lockdown regulations below:
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