Cape Town - The number of Covid-19 cases in the Western Cape has risen to 522, said provincial health department head, Dr Keith Cloete on Thursday.
The announcement was made during Premier Alan Winde's digital conference on the province's coronavirus response which featured Education MEC Debbie Schäfer and representatives from the Departments of Social Development and Health.
During Cloete's portion of the digicon he also touched on the community screening and testing underway in the province and encouraged people to be screened.
He added that 8215 screenings have been done thus far by healthcare workers, with 449 tests having been conducted.
Cloete also said that of the 522 positive Covid-19 cases, 421 cases of those are in the City of Cape Town with 99 being from across the rural districts and two unallocated.
"In terms of hospitalisation, we have 31 people in hospital, 10 in ICU, and only still the three recorded deaths," he said. "In terms of isolation, 18 people are in our designated isolation facilities, and four are being housed in quarantine."
Cloete also said that the Western Cape has secured more masks, which ensures that the province's Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for health workers is sufficient to protect both the public and private healthcare workers.
"In our own department, as the health sector, we have been tracking how many positive Covid-19 cases for healthcare workers and we are very concerned and very prepared to safeguard all our health workers at all times," he said.
"We currently have 15 in the Western Cape, private and public, and only 5 of the 15 healthcare workers have contracted it on a health facility site. The 10 cases have contracted it as part of the community," Cloete said.
The full details of the digicon will be published later, but has also been shared by Premier Alan Winde: