President Cyril Ramaphosa will this weekend chair an urgent meeting of Cabinet that will discuss ways to limit the spread of the coronavirus from travellers coming into the country.
There have been calls by the Democratic Alliance (DA) to impose mandatory 14-day quarantine on all travellers coming into South Africa from the worst-affected countries.
The number of confirmed COVID-19 infections in the country now stands at 24.
All new patients had travelled overseas to countries such as Switzerland, Austria, Greece and Italy.
More than 128 000 people have been diagnosed in 118 countries across the globe, with at least 4600 deaths.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize briefed the media in Limpopo.
“Our role is to make sure that we limit the spread of those who have come from outside. To date, since the process started, we have actually done 848 tests.”
“The President has called for an urgent meeting which will be held on Sunday, in terms of the latest considerations that want to put into the process. And we are assessing and looking at the pattern of how the virus is spreading out.”
Meanwhile, the Health Minister Zweli Mkhize says the South Africans who will be repatriated from Wuhan are not sick.
“The idea of getting them to come back to South Africa had nothing to do with concerns about the health system in China, nothing to do with the fact that they have been sick or anything like that. It was really on a humanitarian basis.”
Mkhize says there are three phases to the repatriation of the South Africans from Wuhan.
“The first one being that evacuation which means getting the aircraft, getting a crew that must go into Wuhan, get the South Africans and bring them back. The second one was the quarantine, which was about ensuring that we could observe them for the 14 days to see whether any of those South Africans could have by any chance got an infection and therefore, we would subject (them) to tests and so on. The third one is the reintegration in society. This one basically means that we would have been able to confirm that the individuals are free of the infections and are free to join their families.”
In the video below, Zweli Mkhize speaks about the repatriation route:
The video below tracks the crew’s trip from SA to Chana and back again:
