Staff Reporter
Free State health authorities have launched a massive exercise to trace members of a local church who could have made contact with five visitors from overseas who have since tested positive for COVID-19, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said.
Addressing a media briefing in Bloemfontein today, Mkhize said the five – two two from Texas in the United States, two from Israel and one from France – have since been quarantined at a bed-and-breakfast establishment in the province.
Management and staff at the facility have also been quarantined.
“We have set this weekend as a target to rush out and get as many of those members of the church, so that we are able to actually start the process of screening them, testing them so as to quarantine them to make sure that we limit the further spread of the infection,” Mkhize said.
The Free State presently has seven confirmed cases of the coronavirus.
The minister said the government has activated a programme of contact tracing to find the members of the church so that they can be evaluated in terms of their risk profile.
Some, he said, will have to be tested immediately and others will be watched depending on the assessment of the tracing team.
The South Africa Red Cross Society has been called to assist and it is deploying over 200 volunteers to help trace the suspects.
“We have therefore . . . discussed with the provincial government that the numbers of the tracing team will have to be reinforced and we have . . . called upon for reinforcement from the SA Red Cross,” Mhkize said.
“They will be reinforcing, with immediate effect, the current provincial team with about 285 volunteers who will be involved in contact tracing.”
The other two cases in the province that have been linked to Brandwag Primary School in Bloemfontein involve two South Africans, one of whom visited Italy and tested positive when they came back.
The second one is a mother of two who is a health worker and has no history of international travel, but she works in a number of private hospitals.
“So, because of the work she does, we have looked at it and identified the numbers of patients that she looks after. They will now be treated as the first set of contact and they will be screened and tested so that we can identify the possible source of the infection,” Mkhize said.
Parents with children in Grades 1-3 at the school have been asked to bring them for screening and possible tasting. They hope to screen and test about 600 people today.
Mkhize said the screening and testing is important because about 75 of coronavirus cases have been spread at family gatherings.
During his packed morning programme, Mkhize also addressed the Provincial Legislature, clinicians, nurses and other medical specialists as well as officials from the private and public laboratories.
“We have done that because we believe the leadership should have a sense of the state of the pandemic in their own environment,” he said.
The minister said Premier Sisi Ntombela has also been asked to activate the provincial command council and must operate on the basis on the Disaster Management Act.