President Cyril Ramaphosa on Friday ordered authorities in the Western Cape to prepare more hospital beds for Covid-19 patients and to alleviate social distress aggravated by the nationwide lockdown, saying this was not national government's responsibility alone.

Ramaphosa said he did not believe the number of beds readied for a further spike in infections was sufficient, as he met with premier Alan Winde at the Cape Town International Conventional Centre (CTICC).

The facility has been converted to provide 860 hospital beds to coronavirus patients.

"I still think that faced with the challenge that we have of greater infections... and having had 77 percent of the deaths in the country, you will need and you do need more beds. We must increase the number of beds. I am not happy and satisfied with the limit you think you are going to have," he told a briefing at the CTICC.

"It is better to over-provide, rather than to under provide because the worst is still and yet to come... I would like to see a margin above what you are providing for," he added, cautioning Winde not to be guided by modelling on the coronavirus.

Ramaphosa responded to submissions by the provincial government that it faced shortages of staff and funding by saying there was no excuse for not having adequate medical personnel to confront the health crisis.

"Not having enough staff members is not going to be an excuse that I will accept, we have got to find them. Money is not going to be the issue. We must pull out all stops to save lives. This is a war," he said.

"We cannot sit back and be defeated by Covid-19 on the basis that we did not have enough staff members."

Ramaphosa said minister of health Zweli Mkhize was ready to send military medical personnel to the province to assist the health authorities. 

The president spoke after listening to a briefing from top officials in the Western Cape, which is governed at provincial level by the opposition Democratic Alliance, on preparations here for an increase in Covid-19 infections in the province. 

It is home to 66.2 percent of the country's 40 792 cases and at the receiving end of blistering criticism from the African National Congress for its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The president's visit comes a day after South Africa registered its biggest daily increase in infections with 3 267 new cases, pushing the country's total number of infection above the 40 000 mark. Of these, 27 006 were recorded in the Western Cape.

Mkhize spent several days in the province this week, and saluted the work done to prepare facilities for Covid-19 patients as fast and innovative.

However, Mkhize warned that it appeared the epidemic would peak in the Western Cape sooner than expected, and therefore more beds were needed urgently.

On Friday, Ramaphosa heard the director of the provincial department of health, Keith Cloete, explain that health officials were embarking on an intensive screening campaign of households and vulnerable groups in the Cape Town area.

Cloete said the province believed that a driven approach to screening helped to reduce infections in the rural town of Ceres, which was seeing 20 new cases a day a fortnight ago, and this was now being replicated in the city.

Ramaphosa said he wanted the approach adopted consistently throughout the province.

The Western Cape is severely affected by South Africa's current shortage in diagnostic material, and has decided to reserve testing for health care workers, the elderly, and those with comorbidity factors.

Responding to this, Ramaphosa said the shortage should "soon" be resolved and implored the province to scale up testing. He noted that the province has said it needs an additional R3-billion to handle the crisis, and said "that will be addressed" and needed to translate into more hospital beds and more health care workers.

Ramaphosa said he was pleased that the Western Cape had cooperated well with national authorities on the Covid-19 epidemic, which he repeated as a war situation, as the province sometimes behaved as though it was separate from the rest of South Africa.

He urged the provincial government to work to alleviate mounting levels of socio-economic distress, adding that this should be done without political bias or corruption. 

"It does not only rest with the national government, the provincial government must also come up with clear strategies of how we are going to support the various places of employment, companies and ensure that people do not lose their jobs," he said.

"But at the social level we do need to take care of those of our citizens who are facing great difficulties at social level where there is hunger and needs to ensure that it happens at the community level, and that we are responsive to the needs of our people and we distribute food as we do so right across the board and we don't politicise the distribution of food and we make sure there is no corruption."