Ramaphosa on tour to motivate communities to get Covid-19 jab
Ramaphosa will visit a public health facility in Tembisa and a private-public partnership centre in Midrand, in recognition of the close collaboration between government, the private sector and the active support of social partners.
PRETORIA, July 29 (ANA) – President Cyril Ramaphosa was on Thursday scheduled to visit two Gauteng Covid-19 vaccination sites to assess the progress in South Africa’s inoculation programme.
Acting Presidency spokesperson Tyrone Seale said Ramaphosa’s visit was also aimed at motivating more South African residents to embrace vaccination as the most effective weapon in the fight against the pandemic.
“Covid-19 vaccines are a safe and effective defence against serious illness, hospitalisation and death,” Seale said in a statement.
Ramaphosa will visit a public health facility in Tembisa and a private-public partnership centre in Midrand, in recognition of the close collaboration between government, the private sector and the active support of social partners.
“This partnership has enabled South Africa’s vaccination programme to gather pace. Under this programme the number of vaccinated people now exceeds 7 million with around a million people being vaccinated every week,” said Seale.
More than 1,500 volunteers comprising doctors, nurses and health workers have been brought on board to help with vaccination on weekends on various sites across all of South Africa’s nine provinces.
“Doing away with sectoral prioritisation and moving to the age-based approach has proven more effective in reaching a wider spectrum of South Africans,” Seale said.
On Wednesday, over 520 more people succumbed to the coronavirus in South Africa, while over 17,351 more people were infected with the virus.
These figures took South Africa’s Covid-19 death toll to 70,908 and the number of confirmed infections since last March to over 2.39 million.
According to the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), the number of new infections was higher than Tuesday’s new cases and also above the average number of new cases per day over the seven preceding days.
– African News Agency (ANA), Editing by Stella Mapenzauswa
