Construction COVID-19 Rapid Response Task Team, a voluntary construction industry collaboration of organisations across the sector, notably for the first time in the history of South Africa, was established to provide a collective construction industry response to the shutdown of all industries imposed through the lockdown restrictions emanating from the Regulations promulgated in April 2020, in respect of the Disaster Management Act of 2002.

The aforementioned restrictions became necessary to enable the country to prepare for and subsequently limit the spread of the COVID -19 pandemic, which by that time had already seriously manifested itself in various other countries across the world. The initial focus of the Task Team was, as a collective to interact with various Government Ministries to share the impact of these measures on an already ailing industry as well as to develop protocols that could be adopted to get the industry “back to work” safely as the Country sought to save lives as well as livelihoods.