CORONAVIRUS
Hundreds of foreign asylum-seekers living in a Cape Town church since February were removed Thursday, April 2, with authorities citing a coronavirus lockdown to justify the action.
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READ MORE: Dozens of policemen broke down the wooden church doors with a hammer and stormed the building.
The asylum-seekers were herded onto buses and taken to a temporary shelter outside the city, where a marquee has been set up to house the homeless during South Africa's 21-day shutdown.
Cape Town City official J.P. Smith said they would eventually be relocated to a separate site reserved for foreigners.
"The COVID lockdown regulations say that you are not allowed to be 100 people congregating on a site," Smith told AFP.
The asylum-seekers, mainly from Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi, started camping outside the Cape Town offices of the United Nations' refugee agency in October, asking the U.N. to relocate them to another country and claiming they no longer feel safe in South Africa following a wave of xenophobic attacks.
South Africa has reported 1,462 confirmed cases of coronavirus and five deaths.
As cases rise and more countries order lockdowns, Africa’s experience with the coronavirus pandemic depends on what happens over the next month, said Dr. John Nkengasong, director of the continent’s Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“And why is that so? Because we expect that by the third to fourth week from now, the virus will begin to seed into different communities, or sub-communities. For example, the most vulnerable populations in slums around capital cities, or even expand to remote areas. And then we’ll begin to understand how severe this pandemic will be,” Nkengasong told journalists during a virtual press briefing Thursday. (VOA/AFP)
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