Each and every day, South African healthcare workers are speaking out about the horrific conditions they are facing in our hospitals.

Last week, two Groote Schuur nurses laid bare what’s happening inside the C27 Respiratory ICU.

As cases surge across the country, particularly in Gauteng, their voices are being joined by other healthcare workers. Any outbreak in the Eastern Cape was always going to spell disaster, given the dire conditions in hospitals before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Political commentator Justice Malala summed that up yesterday:

What’s happening at Mthatha General & other hospitals in the Eastern Cape will surprise no one who has followed the @Dispatch_DD’s reports in the last 20 years.The ANC looted, mismanaged and destroyed those facilities. If your relative dies there, it’s not COVID19. It’s the ANC.

— Justice Malala (@justicemalala) June 28, 2020

Words like those offer zero consolation to the province’s healthcare workers, and some of the stories coming out are staggering in their sadness.

City Press spoke with doctors and others, who say the Eastern Cape’s system has “collapsed”:

“We are sitting with a situation where patients are lying in the corridors of hospitals like Livingstone in Port Elizabeth and are dying, and there may soon be a similar situation Dora Nginza in Zwide,” a doctor told City Press’ sister publication, Rapport.

“Many of them need oxygen, but there is not enough for everyone. So, those without oxygen are fighting those who do have it to try to ‘steal’ it. Sick people are fighting each other. It is literally a ‘survival of the fittest’ situation. It is awful,” said the distraught doctor.

Let that sink in – sick people are fighting each other for resources to try and stay alive.

Another doctor, working at the maternity unit of Dora Nginza hospital, said that the true scale of what they see can never be explained, saying staff were “emotionally broken” and “there is not a single healthcare worker who will ever be the same after this thing”.

I’ll take this opportunity to once again say that if you refuse to wear a mask in public, you’re a complete and total doos.

If you still need convincing that wearing a face mask works, read this.

Despite repeated calls for help made to the Eastern Cape department of health, who made grand promises of making available further personnel and additional personal protective equipment, nothing has been done.

Meanwhile, Sizwe Kupelo, spokesperson for the Eastern Cape health department, said he was “unaware” of these problems, and that nobody had spoken to him about it.

Imagine fighting this pandemic on the front line, crying out for help, being made hollow promises, and then seeing the department deny that you have even asked for help?

Journalists on the ground routinely report “rubbish and medical waste on the floors, blood on the walls and injured patients helping other patients”, and this News24 video, filmed inside Livingstone Hospital in Port Elizabeth, is jarring to say the least:

Remember that this is the province’s richest city, and then try and picture what is happening in rural hospitals, after decades of corruption and neglect.

We can’t change that fact, but as citizens, we can do our part to ensure that we minimise the risk of contracting, or spreading, the virus.

As much as we all suffer from lockdown fatigue, with more than three months of rules and regulations governing what we are allowed to do, the need to act responsibly is more important than ever.

[source:citypress]