“We identify those that are COVID-19 positive and those that have symptoms.”
Health workers were sent to the overcrowded block of single-room flats — mainly occupied by men from rural areas doing odd jobs in the city — as part of a mass community screening and testing campaign launched by the government last month.
But as South Africa’s coronavirus outbreak picks up the pace — with confirmed cases creeping over 13,500, including 247 deaths — Mdlalose and other health experts are beginning to see the limits of the country’s lauded community screening strategy. “We decided that we shouldn’t just wait in hospitals for patients to arrive,” said the government’s top coronavirus advisor Salim Abdool Karim. “We had to have a more proactive approach and go out there.”
“This is the largest and most extensive public health mobilisation in the history of our country,” President Cyril Ramaphosa said during an address this week. “With longer and longer turnaround times… someone somewhere has got to make a decision about where the priority lies,” he added.“We expected this,” he told AFP. “This is by far the largest pandemic known to humankind.”Mdlalose sighed in frustration earlier this week as she pulled on protective gear and counted up swab kits to test the 20-odd workers of a community clinic outside Johannesburg.
“We haven’t dodged the bullet, we are still going to have masses of positive cases,” Mdlalose told nurses at a training session.
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