Question NW821 to the Minister of Health
08 June 2020 - NW821
Chirwa, Ms NN to ask the Minister of Health
Following the admission by the Office of The Presidency that information regarding Covid-19 was being withheld from the public, (a) what are the details of the information that is being withheld from the public, (b) how will the specified information affect public responses and (c) what is the true status of hospitals in handling the pandemic?
Reply:
(a)-(b) We are unsure which statement from the Presidency this question refers to. However there have been media requests for the modeling done by various groups to be made public. The National Department of Health convened a public symposium of all modelers on Thursday the 21st of May 2020 during which the models, together with the assumptions used for the modeling outputs were presented.
(c) Hospitals in the public sector are currently being prepared to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. General beds are being repurposed into critical care beds and field hospitals are being built jin many provinces. In addition, a national ventilator project has been established by DTI and donations have been received (for example 1,000 ventilators donated by the US government - of which 50 have already been received).
END.