Western Cape premier Alan Winde has called for South Africans to go out and support local businesses to save the economy, and stave off job losses.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know that up until now we\u2019ve been saying [that] you need to stay at home as much as possible,\u201d Winde said in a digital press conference<\/a> on Thursday. \u201cLet\u2019s go out and support business. Let\u2019s go out and save jobs and let\u2019s go do it safely as a society.\u201d<\/p>\n Winde said he spoke<\/a> to some business owners on Wednesday during a walkabout in the Mother City\u2019s central business district.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was great to see that they were positive and looking forward to the next stage post-Covid,\u201d he said. \u201cBut what really struck me was, you would meet a business, but across the road you would see a \u2018To Let\u2019 sign.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019d speak to an entrepreneur and he would tell you how the businesses just in the area where he or she would be operating, had been closed. That was really disturbing to me,\u201d the premier said.<\/p>\n He said that the Western Cape government has not received the Covid-19 funding it was promised by the national government.<\/p>\n \u201cThere has been some money in and out, but it\u2019s a bit of bookkeeping. In general, of the R5.3 billion that we have spent so far, the answer is no. We have not had that funding. We\u2019ve had to find within our budget.”<\/p>\n Western Cape Health Department head Dr Keith Cloete said that the province peaked at the of June and early July. It has since dropped week-by-week. Currently 15% of tests which are sent to laboratories are positive, levels last seen in May, he said.<\/p>\n The last patients were discharged from the ‘Hospital of Hope’ at Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) on 14 August<\/a>. It opened on 8 June and housed 1,502 patients of which 81 died.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are decommissioning the facility on the basis that we have sufficient capacity to be able to deal with any future resurgence based on our experience over the last three to four months,\u201d Dr Cloete said.<\/p>\n The equipment from the temporary hospital and its staff will be redistributed where needed.<\/p>\n Cloete added they might use some tactics, such as contact tracing, which have been used to fight Covid-19 to tackle other diseases such as tuberculosis (TB).<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s innovative ways of finding patients other than people having to present themselves to health facilities for that test,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n According to Stats SA\u2019s latest report<\/a> on mortality and causes of death, released in March this year, TB was the top underlying natural cause of death. It claimed the life of just over one in every 20 South Africans (6.4%).<\/p>\n The latest Covid-19 related data<\/a> for the Western Cape showed just 5,345 active cases.<\/p>\n
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