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COVID-19 outbreak brought a sudden change in the manner in which both staff and students conducted academic business at the University. The closure of academic campuses and the suspension of face to face contact meant that staff and students had to adapt to the online environment with immediate effect. Both groups had to learn new skills and some had to acquire devices to be able to work and study online. This period brought to the fore the inequality and inequity gap that exists amongst both the students and Library staff. The study seeks to understand the extend and nature of the challenges

This study is comprised of three sub-studies that together make up our research into the healthcare response to COVID-19.

Firstly, we will conduct a policy review: to identify and analyse what the South African health policy and guideline documents specify as ‘the response’ in relation to COVID-19. This will serve as informative background data and will provide both a broad-based and top-level / official view of responses to COVID-19 (focusing on the national and provincial health levels, and where appropriate specific municipal levels). This will be conducted in real time as the state’s

The concept of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been used extensively for the detection of drug use patterns and disease incidence from a population perspective. Recently researchers have proposed SARS-CoV-2 sewage-monitoring plan as a form of an early warning system. It can have an important effect on health systems; facilitate informed decisions on movement restriction for the local population, especially in resource-constraint countries like South Africa. Therefore, the research will focus on using wastewater-based epidemiology to determine COVID-19 infection hotspots and develop an

In South Africa, several measures have been taken by government to prevent and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Interventions implemented include, community education, establishing lab testing capacity, social distancing, promoting regular handwashing, closure of schools and a ban on mass gathering. Further measures like closing the borders to international travel, intensified curtailment of human interactions through a national lockdown, door-to-door screening, surveillance, testing, isolation and contact tracing in the community have been implemented to curtail community spread of the

We aim to identify the impact of government regulations for COVID-19 on social interaction and behaviour. To achieve this we will interview 400 residents of the Africa Health Research Institute Population Intervention Platform area in northern KwaZulu-Natal. These interviews will be repeated every two weeks up to eight times. We will collect information on the frequency and characteristics of social contacts during the Covid-19 epidemic, and assess how the effect of government policies varies by by age, gender, comorbidity and social position. We will compare these results to data from 2019 on

A coordinated system of disease surveillance will be critical to effectively control the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic. Such systems enable rapid detection and mapping of epidemics and inform allocation of scarce prevention and intervention resources. Although many lower- and middle-income settings lack infrastructure for optimal disease surveillance, health and demographic surveillance systems (HDSS) provide a unique opportunity for epidemic monitoring.
The South African Population Research Infrastructure Network, has repurposed the health and demographic surveillance systems