Statement by Minister of Health Dr Joe Phaahla on the repeal of regulations on notifiable medical conditions dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic and on monkey-pox

Today is a very historic day as we have reached a turning point since the outbreak of Covid-19 in the world and in the country. We recall that our first case was confirmed on 5 March 2020 in Pietermaritzburg from a South African who had travelled to Europe.

The President of the Republic, President Cyril Ramaphosa constituted the National Coronvirus Command Council and following its meeting he announced on 16 March 2020 that a Nationwide lockdown would start on midnight of 19 March 2020 with a strict stay at home unless you had permission to undertake essential services. Since then four full waves of the pandemic have ensued with the first 3 waves causing devastation with loss of lives across all sectors of society including health workers.

Disruptions of social and economic life have been huge most painful being families unable to visit loved ones who were seriously ill in hospital and for those who passed away, being buried under strict conditions. On the economic side, major losses of jobs and closure of several business especially SMME’S but even big hotels, airlines etc.
To delay the spread and allow health facilities to prepare capacity, even as the strict lockdown was lifted a risk adjusted strategy was used to reduce the spread of the virus.

In February 2021 we started vaccination under the Sisonke program led by the MRC starting with health workers and following with Education. In May 2021 when we started with the high risk age group of 60+ and progressively rolled out vaccination until we could open for 12-17 years old in November 2021.

We want to take this opportunity on behalf of all government to thank South Africans for their support and cooperation over the last 2 years and 3 months. While there was a lot of common ground and agreement even across political lives early in the pandemic when we all thought it would be short and over within a few months, the longer it took more fatigue and disagreements on strategy started to surface. We appreciate the fact that not withstanding the disagreements even leading to threats or even actual court actions the mainframe of our collective action remained until today. We thank South Africans for resilience in internalizing various measures of prevention and mitigation against the virus some of which will help us in dealing with some older respiratory diseases such as influenza and TB but also future respiratory epidemics.