#CoronaVirusSA: ‘Government has a plan for townships and rural areas’
“We are concerned about the communities, the poor, the working class in the townships, informal settlements and the rural areas where resources are scarce and there’s challenged health services,” said the Minister of Health Dr Zweli Mkhize on Monday at the inter-ministerial meeting on Covid-19 outbreak.
The department is working on strengthening the issue of Covid-19 prevention, he added, because that is the cheapest and the easiest way to lessen the virus’ infection rate. To this end, the department is intensifying communication — reaching out to community leaders and dispensing pamphlets to inform more people.
“We are meeting a number of leaders on Thursday and going to issue pamphlets — as well as go on radio [to talk about the virus]. This is so we can reach out to the largest number of people, so that they understand and we can demystify this virus,” Mkhize said.
‘We’ve dealt with epidemics before’
According to Mkhize, inequality is most visible in times of epidemics, and explained how more resources are needed when providing treatment in poor, or underprivileged areas.
“And with all the epidemics that we deal with, we always find that we need more resources particularly in the rural or poor areas. But in the past we have dealt with cholera, malaria — and recently listeriosis,” he added.
The department is looking to include community healthcare workers, and the expanded public works programme as part of the Covid-19 information campaign in townships and rural areas. These workers will also assist in augmenting tracer teams so that communities are aware of what symptoms to look out for, where to get tested and more.
“The focus on underprivileged communities is actually the thrust of why we’re taking this route,” Mkhize said. – Health-e News
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
#CoronaVirusSA: ‘Government has a plan for townships and rural areas’
by jamesthabo, Health-e News
March 17, 2020