Gauteng must fix its yo-yo Covid-10 hospital figures

27 July 2020

The Gauteng Health Department’s daily figures for COVID-19 patients in hospital lack credibility as they yo-yo up and down and appear to exclude many public hospitals.

Yesterday the hospitalization figure was given as 5007, on Saturday it was 3617, and on Friday it was 7193, whereas it was as low as 2417 on the Tuesday before.

It appears that the large jump last week was because patients from the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital were included for the first time. How can it be that our largest hospital was not reporting COVID-19 figures for such a long time?

I suspect the real total figure is closer to 10 000 as most of the public hospitals are not reporting their figures and one can expect that between 15-20% of active cases would be hospitalized.

The department needs to give accurate total figures for COVID-19 hospitalizations so that we can properly track progress in fighting this pandemic.  

Issued by Jack Bloom, DA Gauteng Shadow Health MEC, 27 July 2020