Pretoria - Gauteng Premier David Makhura has applauded the drive-through vaccination site at the Zwartkops Raceway along the R55 for helping the government in moving towards getting 11 million adults in the province vaccinated.
Makhura was speaking at the raceway site where he commended the volunteers for ensuring the site reached its first milestone of 5 000 vaccinations in just 10 days since it opened its doors.
According to the Makhura, the drive-through site was the busiest site in the province and through the dedication of the volunteers was vaccinating at least 500 people per day and even achieved 1 000 vaccinations during their first-weekend initiative.
"I want to thank the volunteers here and urge them to push to ensure we at least reach 1 000 vaccinations daily. To aid them in their initiative we will be bringing an additional pop-up site here as well."
"We will do what we can to increase the capacity to ensure that people do not take too long to vaccinate. We are going around everywhere as Gauteng has a summit to climb because we've only reached 1.1 million out of 11 million adults and we still have a long way to go."
On a positive note, Makhura said they were pleased that after raising the alarm two weeks prior on the low levels of men coming in for their jabs they had noticed a remarkable improvement.
As of Friday more men were reportedly making their way to sites to get vaccinated with their turnout increasing by 1.5%.
"What is good to see is that more men, particularly the young men are now driving the vaccination and I want to say well done to them because we are at least standing at 44.5%."
The government would however not be dropping the ball on getting more men to come for vaccinations by ensuring that they went to where they were, be it at their workplaces, transport nodes or factories.
Makhura said they were also engaging various sectors to see how the government could incentivise the vaccination programme with meetings still under way.
"We're still watching the numbers but the last several days' average number of people being hospitalised and the positivity rate in the province has declined to roughly around 11%. And once it goes down below 10% we know we should prepare for the next wave as per scientists predictions."
In spite of this looming possibility, Makhura said the province would hopefully be in a much better place should the time come.
Pretoria News