The National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) suggested on Friday that the South African government had failed to heed its warnings about a spike in Covid-19 cases in the Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB) area, as well as the fragility of the health system in the face of the pandemic.

In a statement issued hours after President Cyril Ramaphosa urged South Africans to change their behaviour to prevent a resurgence of Covid-19 infections while declaring NMB a hotspot for the virus, NEHAWU said it had tried to warn the government after a June visit to the area.

“We reported to government and the Department of Health that the Nelson Mandela bay area was a ticking time bomb and urgent interventions were needed,” NEHAWU said.

“Recently, reports of overflowing hospitals, lack of workers to attend to patients and dilapidated infrastructure are hogging the headlines, however, this is not news to us as we tried our utmost best to alert government about the impending disaster.”

In a national address broadcast live on television on Thursday night, Ramaphosa said Nelson Mandela Bay and the Sarah Baartman District in the Eastern Cape province, as well as the Garden Route district in the Western Cape accounted for most of South Africa’s recent surge in new Covid-19 infections.

Added to this, several hospitals in the Nelson Mandela Bay metro had reported a rise in alcohol-related trauma admissions.

To contain the rise in infections in the Eastern Cape and Western Cape, Ramaphosa said the government was putting into motion a resurgence plan developed with the World Health Organization.

On Friday, NEHAWU the rise in new infections should be a cause for concern and should prompt all South Africans to strictly follow all Covid-19 protocols and regulations.

“Our fragile healthcare system will not survive a second wave considering that most of our healthcare facilities are still struggling with understaffing, intermittent supply of personal protective equipment and drugs shortages,” it said.

“We call on our government to revisit our fact-finding mission report which provides solutions to the problems faced by our hospitals and clinics.”

It said its members in the health sector would once again be called upon to lead the fight against the coronavirus by the same government that had — in NEHAWU’s words — “called workers greedy” for demanding that it honour a now-rescinded pay rise for public sector workers that had been agreed to be effected from April 2020.

The government has said it can now no longer afford the salary increase due to an ailing economy — worsened by the health pandemic — which has resulted in a slump in revenue collection.