By Henry Bantjez
He was a healthy 76 year old. Every day he waited for the SMS. “Why are they taking so long?” he would say. “I can’t wait forever to be vaccinated.”
Unfortunately, he had a stroke. The SMS never came. Hospitalised, and paralysed in most of his left body, a nurse placed a panic button in his left hand, disabling him from calling for help. Dehydrated, he reached for a glass of water and fell out of bed.
The second stroke happened leaving him incapacitated with zero speech, motor ability and dignity. He was tested Covid-negative at entry. Shortly after that he contracted Covid in ICU.
His wife and son, unable to visit, called every day. A nurse holding a phone to his ear noticed the emotion on his face when they played Elvis Presley’s Are You Lonesome Tonight. Unable to breathe naturally plus a lung infection, he died.
How many of you know loved ones who were admitted into hospital as Covid-negative and left Covid-positive, many of them now deceased?
Doctors have long claimed hospitals have struggled to stop Covid spreading because of shortages of single rooms, beds, a lack of PPE and an inability to test staff and patients early in the pandemic. This in turn has a negative impact on the ability of the Gauteng public health system to manage the third wave of Covid-19.
As an educated guess, it means the department of health has not placed trusted hospital infection and disaster controls in place and our entire nation is at risk in this third wave.
Would it not be prudent to ensure every Covid-negative patient admitted into any hospital be vaccinated? Surely this would ensure fewer incidents of patients becoming Covid-positive in hospitals? Does this not make sense?
Shame on you, South African government. Shame on you with your embarrassing rate of Covid-19 vaccination roll-out programmes, with South Africa lagging far behind Third World countries like Ghana, Rwanda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Morocco and so many more.
This is disgusting and unacceptable.
I was also struggling with the question of who is infecting us in hospitals or how it is happening.
Can it be a lack of hand washing? Faulty PPE? Covid-positive patients being exposed to Covid negative patients? Are the infections coming from hospital staff, such as doctors, nurses, care attendants, cleaners, or physical and respiratory therapists who frequent the rooms? Are the infections from surfaces improperly cleaned?
Now I can take a deep breath and unapologetically say: “Who cares”. There is a vaccine for a reason. Newly admitted patients should be vaccinated. In fact we should demand it.
If you know of anyone who contracted Covid in a hospital in the last two or three months and died, know this – if they were living in Zimbabwe or Ghana, chances are they still would be alive because they would have been vaccinated.
I would like to express my sincere and heartfelt sympathy to the families of our citizens who unnecessarily lost their loved-ones to Covid, contracted in hospitals. I feel your anger and disappointment and I pray that you will get through your grief.
Henry Bantjez is a cognitive behavioural therapy practitioner and influencer.
* This article is dedicated to my father, Jerry, who contracted Covid-19 on June 21. RIP.
The Star