Hon Chairperson, the first question is about the number of people who were referred to private hospitals during the strike. The figure we have at our disposal is 1 220 patients from Gauteng and North West. The Western Cape and the Northern Cape confirmed that they never transferred anybody to any private hospital during the strike. We do not have any information yet for the other provinces. We are still checking.
Until we are sent invoices, it will not be easy to guess how much these transfers are going to cost the state. This would just be a very wild guess. We will not be able to enter into that.
On the issue of how many people died during the strike, I am sure we are very much aware that this strike had many unique features, which some of us have never experienced in our lifetime. Perhaps even the oldest members of this House have never experienced what we have seen, so the issue of identifying which people died during the strike is a very complex one. It is something not to be taken lightly. One of the main reasons why this is the case is that even during times when there is no strike, to determine the cause of the death of somebody is not a matter to be taken lightly.
That is why in some instances we hold inquests, which are headed by judges or very highly professional people. We do postmortems. Some hospitals, on an everyday basis, do what they call mortality meetings, where they call professors to come and determine the cause of death because one can't just stand up publicly and say that a particular person was killed by such and such a thing. As a country, we went through these three weeks which were very complex. Obviously, because of the complexity, a lot of complex and abnormal things might have happened, including death. But I can't sit down and point out certain things. There are obvious cases, of course, like the nurse who was hit by a brick.
If she had died, it would have been directly due to strikers because she was attacked by them. We had other cases whereby people were dragged out of theatres. You would remember that I came out publicly and said that this was murder. I came out publicly and said that if one was undertaking an operation and the strikers came to drag out the people who were conducting the operation, this was murder.
However, you are aware that nobody died due to that because the doctors who were performing operations where this happened stood up and said, "You'd rather have to kill us!". They refused to leave those patients alone. The perpetrators tried but they never succeeded.
The other complication we had was that, for instance, the biggest hospital in the Southern Hemisphere, Chris Hani Baragwanath, has 30 deaths on any normal day. But during the strike, the deaths went down to 18 and are now back at 25 after the strike.
You may argue that most people might have died at home and did not come to the hospital. How will that be determined? So, this is a matter that needs very thorough consideration, and we are still doing that. Thank you.