Mpumalanga Premier Refilwe Mtsweni-Tsipane has expressed concern about the high rate of COVID-19 infections in the Nkomazi Local Municipality. Mtsweni-Tsipane was speaking while monitoring the vaccine roll-out programme in Acornhoek under the Bushbuckridge Local Municipality. Currently, the province has administered over 450 000 vaccines.
The Mpumalanga government wants people in rural areas to have easy access to public vaccination centres. This, it believes will assist in reaching herd immunity in vaccinating for COVID-19 as the province has many rural areas. In one of the public vaccination centres at Accornhoek Mall in Bushbuckridge people showed enthusiasm in taking their vaccines. Workers at the retail shops, taxi operators, hawkers and shoppers got an opportunity to get vaccinated. Some say time constraints had prevented them from being vaccinated. They have encouraged other people to come forward and vaccinate.
“I just felt the medication inside my body but it’s not painful, I haven’t heard anything. I see the situation in the world the people are passing away. My friend told me to come and vaccinate because I will be in trouble,” says a worker.
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Mtsweni-Tsipane said the province’s vaccination drive is now focusing on rural and public places where the majority of people are found. She said walk-ins are also allowed at the vaccination centres.
“The vaccine is rolling out quite nicely as you can see now. We are going to deep rural areas where we are vaccinating our communities and the turn-out is also good. We have extended to shops like Clicks, over and above that we have increased our vaccination stations even including our malls,” says Mtsweni-Tsipane.
Mtsweni-Tsipane said the Nkomazi Local Municipality is one of the areas that need special attention as the infection rate increases.
“Out of 33 wards, what we have established is that 20 of them are hotspot areas. It means two-thirds of the wards of Nkomazi, COVID-19 is quite prevalent. It’s a municipality that we are looking at attending to, we are going out there to encourage and monitor the facilities as well so that our people can be vaccinated.”
The province has over 130 000 positive cases so far with over 1700 fatalities. Active cases stand at over 7000.
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