Health minister Zweli Mkhize says the NICD has activated an emergency operations centre, but there are no plans to impose travel restrictions
SA has activated the emergency operations centre at the National Institutes of Communicable Disease and stepped up surveillance for the new respiratory illness that emerged in China earlier in January, but has no immediate plans to impose travel restrictions or repatriate its citizens, health minister Zweli Mkhize said on Friday.
“We are very confident in China’s capacity to manage the epidemic and that our citizens in China are in good hands,” he said. “We will continue to monitor the situation on a day-by-day basis and will respond as we see appropriate at that time,” he said. The WHO’s declaration is the sixth in the past decade — recent examples include Ebola and the Zika virus — and gives fresh impetus to its efforts to get governments to ramp up their response to the coronavirus. It gives the WHO power to make recommendations such as travel advisories and review the measures implemented in affected countries, but its recommendations are not legally binding.
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