Inside Covid-19: Cyril’s R500bn war chest; Soccer City becoming 1,500 bed hospital; UCT Class of ’93; Sweden – Ep 22

In episode twenty two of Inside Covid-19, highlights of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa's historic R500bn Coronavirus Budget; we hear from the architects commissioned to transform Soccer City into a 1,500 bed hospital; an architect of a different kind, Sweden's scientific advisor who has taken the Scandinavian country away from the lockdown approach of the rest of the world; and two impassioned voices calling for an end to SA's economic confinement – the spokesman for UCT's Medical School class of 1993, and Dr Theuns Eloff, former CEO of the FW de Klerk Foundation. – Alec Hogg

First in the Covid-19 headlines today:

• Tonight, SA's president Cyril Ramaphosa unveiled a R500bn war chest to fight the coronavirus, funded by R130bn in reallocations from February's National Budget and borrowing from special Covid-19 support packages created by multilateral institutions like the IMF, World Bank and BRICS.
• South Africa's officially confirmed Covid-19 cases rose by a relatively modest 142 today to 3,465, of whom just under a third have fully recovered. Mortalities remained at 58. Worldwide, the number of confirmed cases surpassed 2.5m today with deaths slightly above 175,000. Around a quarter of the cases are denoted as recovered or discharged from hospital. According to data on worldometers.info Belgium is now officially the hardest hit nation with 518 deaths per 1m of population; followed by Spain at 455; Italy at 408; France at 319; the UK at 255 and the Netherlands at 229. In absolute terms, mortalities are by far the highest in the USA, at 43,663, equivalent to 132 for every one million residents. South Africa continues to lag the global averages, having lost the equivalent of one for every million people who live here, compared with the international average of 22.5.
• Although South Africa's coronavirus cases remain among the lowest in the world on a per capita basis, as the country gets ready to re-open its economy, the medical sector is preparing for an infection spike everyone believes is coming. Among the projects is a R1bn investment that will turn the 120,000 seater Soccer City into a 1,500 bed hospital. This will include 600 Intensive Care beds, increasing the current national total by 20%. Coming up in this episode, an interview with the architects commissioned to design a project to transform the stadium into a field hospital in less than three weeks.
• The world continues to pay close attention to Sweden, where the authorities have chosen not to slow down the spread of the virus through an enforced lockdown. The country's chief epidemiologist believes the curve is now naturally flattening with mortalities at 175 per million of population, three times that of lockdown enforcing neighbour Denmark and six times fellow Scandinavian Norway.