Following the success of a vaccination rollout that saw Limpopo record the largest percentage of adults inoculated so far, the provincial department of health has now taken its drive to high density sites including mines, farms and shopping malls to administer jabs.
On Friday, MEC for health Phophi Ramathuba led a vaccination drive at one of the hardest hit mines in the province, Marula Mine in Burgersfort, where more than a thousand miners received their jabs.
The mine was forced to shut down last year after it recorded the highest number of Covid-19 positive cases, but was eventually opened to resume operations.
Ramathuba said mining is an important sector that keeps the economy going.
“Mines can be regarded as super spreaders by their nature because workers work in groups. Hence we reached out to the Marula and Exxaro mines, and we brought in our team to help in vaccinating more workers,” the MEC said.
Moses Mtlhageng, executive manager of operations at the mine, said 70% of their miners have received their vaccines since last week.
“We were aiming to vaccinate all 4,300 workers in two months and we are now left with 800 employees. On Friday alone we vaccinated 1,625 workers with the help of the department of health,” he said.
“Covid-19 really affected our operation because we have to split workers into small groups in order to mitigate the spread of the virus. We have managed to adjust with the new normal and workers clock in from 6am-8am to avoid them clocking in at once.”
Limpopo has been hailed for taking the vaccine rollout to the people with a ground-breaking model that used community leaders to ramp up its vaccine rollout programme in rural areas and convince people to get the jab.
So successful has the Limpopo health department been that it had to scale down on its targeted vaccination sites at the weekend due to it running low on vaccine doses. The department had targeted farms and malls as part of its campaign to reach herd immunity.
“Many people are coming in numbers to get jabs – some despite the fact that they didn’t register. And we don’t turn anyone away, we allow walk-ins so that people shouldn’t wait for text messages for their next date,” said Ramathuba.
She said their approach was now being replicated by other provinces with similar settings.
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