Zimbabwe Covid-19 survivor fears having to live with the stigma
|Published
Harare - When Saul Sakudya arrived in an
ambulance at a hospital in Zimbabwe's capital after contracting Covid-19, he said the medical staff wouldn't go near him because
they were afraid of becoming infected.
The 52-year-old businessman was among the first people in
Zimbabwe to test positive for the coronavirus after a trip
to Dubai last month to buy supplies for his electronics shop,
and hospital personnel had not yet been issued protective
clothing.
"The way they dispersed was as if there were 10 hungry lions
being released from the ambulance, imagine, yet I am just a
human being," Sakudya told Reuters. "I thought I would die."
After a three-hour wait in the ambulance, doctors brought
the father of four into an isolation ward at the Beatrice Road
Infectious Diseases Hospital, he said.
Prosper Chonzi, health director for Harare city, which runs
the hospital, told Reuters that when Sakudya was admitted, it
had not yet implemented protocols to handle coronavirus
patients.
The national government is now renovating the hospital to
deal with such cases, said Chonzi.
Even in the best of times, Zimbabwe's health system suffers
from shortages of medicine and basic equipment. The government
has been raising donations of protective clothing, but frontline
health workers say supplies are still inadequate.
Covid-19 survivor Saul Sakudya talks with his wife Joyce during a nationwide lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus in Harare. Picture: Gift Sukhala/Reuters
As of Friday, the country had recorded 31 cases of Covid-19
and four deaths.
Sakudya's symptoms were relatively mild. So when his wife
and two adult sons tested positive for the virus while he was in
hospital, he opted to return home where the four could take care
of each other.
He has since recovered and says his family members are also
doing well. But he fears they will have to live with the stigma
of the disease for some time.
Although he was given the all clear after two tests, friends
and relatives won't visit or talk to him, even from a distance,
he said.
"Some people somehow think I still have residue of the
virus," he said.
"I heard one person referring to my road as corona road, and
some people now avoid the road altogether. It hurts, but I have
to be mature and accept it."