The Western Cape has 15 930 active cases of COVID-19, with a total of 76 851 confirmed cases and 58 598 recoveries.
The province has recorded an additional 41 deaths, bringing the total number of COVID-19 related deaths in the province to 2323. To date, 347 945 tests have been conducted, and 1 660 people have been admitted to hospital of which 294 are in ICU or high care.
The breakdown is as follows:
Minister of Community Safety, Albert Fritz launched the Neighbourhood Watch (NHW) Safety Improvement Volunteers Project in Khayelitsha today [July 11] and handed over 15 starter kits to neighbourhood watches in the area.
“These Neighbourhood Watches will help to ensure social distancing, hygiene, and mask wearing in places where people congregate (such as shopping centres, transport interchanges and SASSA paypoints) in their communities, and form part of our hotspot strategy interventions to bring about behaviour change and slow the spread of the virus,” said Premier Alan Winde in a statement.
“They have received training from Medicins Sans Frontiers, and the starter kits include sanitisers, bottles for the sanitiser, masks, branded Neighbourhood Watch t-shirts and tape that will allow them to mark out lines for social distancing.”
The pilot programme is in Khayelitsha. It will soon roll out to an additional 23 neighbourhood watches in the Eastern, Tygerberg, Klipfontein and Southern hotspot areas.
The programme has been designed with accountability and monitoring in mind. Applications were scrutinized by a panel made up of representatives from the Department of Community Safety, SAPS and the City of Cape Town. Neighbourhood watches have to be accredited, and supported by SAPS and their CPF.
They will also be expected to keep daily logs, which should be verified and the Department will conduct unannounced visits to oversee the work they are doing.
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