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- Frontline workers are working day and night amid the country’s second wave.
- This, given that hospital beds are rapidly filling up with infections close to a million.
- An exhausted intensive care nurse in Cape Town said the stress was taking a toll on the nursing staff.
Midwife Annamarie Odendaal has canceled all staff working in the Covid-19 ward from vacationing at the Arwyp Private Medical Center in Johannesburg as a second wave of the coronavirus threatens to overwhelm South Africa’s healthcare system.
“I called them because now we are in a peak period, so it is not easy for the staff because they also want to go back to their relatives,” he told Reuters on Christmas Day.
“Sometimes they are tired, but they never say ‘I can’t go to work.’ The patient always comes first for them.”
A confluence of school holidays, public laxity, and a potentially more infectious new variant of the virus has left authorities scrambling to counter an earlier-than-expected resurgence of infections that saw daily new cases spike nearly sevenfold from a month ago to 2018. top. 14305 on December 24.
Amid beeping from monitors and fans, Odendaal, 60, said the situation was getting worse as hospital beds were rapidly filling up.
Several countries, including the UK, which has found the mutant variant in South African-related cases, have banned flights from the country, disrupting vacation travel plans and frustrating tour operators.
The latest data showed that the infection count so far rose to 968,563 on Thursday. If the trajectory continues, South Africa would break the million mark on Sunday, a Reuters tally showed.
South Africa has recorded 25,983 deaths, the highest on the continent.
READ | Mkhize criticizes UK travel ban, Covid-19 variant in SA is no more dangerous than UK variant
At the Groote Schuur public hospital in Cape Town, where the world’s first person-to-person heart transplant was performed in 1967, intensive care nurse Verna Collins said she was physically and emotionally drained.
“We thought we were at the end of October, early November, and now this dark cloud is circling again, so emotionally it takes a lot out of the nursing staff,” Collins said outside the hospital on a short break from Covid-19. ICU room, which has reached its capacity.
Dressed in theatrical uniforms and a red Santa hat, the mother of one said she was scheduled to work on Christmas Day, but that several of her co-workers had to cancel their vacation plans after they called again.
The Mediclinic private hospital group said the number of patients seeking care at its hospitals in the Western Cape and the rising incidents in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng had already surpassed those of the first peak and that most of its intensive care units and intensive care units were operating at full capacity.
During the first wave earlier this year, his hospital had fewer ICU patients, but now “they don’t respond well to treatment, so they end up in the ICU 90% of the time,” Collins said.
