The 217 Cuban doctors were deployed to the country earlier this year to assist in the fight against COVID-19, with 28 of them currently working in KwaZulu-Natal.
More than 200 Cuban doctors arrived in the country early on Sunday morning to bolster support in the fight against Covid-19. Picture: GCIS.
DURBAN – KwaZulu-Natal authorities said that Cuban doctors would remain in the province despite the decrease in COVID-19 infections.
According to Premier Sihle Zikalala, about 6% of the province’s close to 120,000 COVID-19 cases were still active.
The 217 Cuban doctors were deployed to the country earlier this year to assist in the fight against COVID-19, with 28 of them currently working in KwaZulu-Natal.
Health MEC Nomagugu Simelane-Zulu said that the Cuban doctors were still needed in the province.
“A few of them were epidemiologists. Now, as a province, we are running out of those. We don’t have enough, so we are quite happy to have them because we will be able to utilise them.”
Simelane-Zulu said that they had, however, started disinvesting from quarantine sites in a bid to save costs but this was proving to have its challenges.
“We had gone out to get BnBs, hotels and so forth to utilise. Now that our numbers have gone down, we are getting out of the contracts that we had with the different facilities. I must, however, indicate that it’s not the easiest thing to do because we’ve got a legal document that is binding.”
At the same time, provincial authorities have thanked residents for adhering to COVID-19 regulations, saying this had contributed to the decrease in community transmissions.