Ugly truth of being poor
VOLUNTEERS: SEE HOW ELDERLY PATIENT KEEPS FOOD FOR DEPENDENTS LEFT AT HOME
Covid-19 uncovers shame of how health system fails the most vulnerable.
Hoarding food and agonising over dependents left at home, patients at Gauteng’s only Covid-19 field hospital taught healthcare volunteers some hard lessons on the ugly truth of being poor and depending on a broken healthcare system.
Some long-term effects of this virus will affect the body while the trauma of facing mortality in isolation are among the lesser known consequences of being a critical or intermediate patient at a Covid-19 field hospital.
As the pandemic in SA descends from its peak, front-liners in the healthcare sector reflect on the their experiences in the thick of a war against a strange enemy.
Physiotherapists who volunteered at the Nasrec Convention Centre’s field hospital say the virus’ siege on the poor has uncovered the shame of a system which has failed its most vulnerable patients.
By the time the infection rate was hovering at around 1 200 new cases in early September, the R24 million facility was at around 10% capacity in the 400-bed setting.
According to orthopaedic physiotherapist Terry Rogan, the experience was a hard reality check as she switched the comfort of her Sandton practice to treat patients in a government facility, some of whom were eating full meals for the first time in months.
The physiotherapists often became confidants to the patients, who were desperate for a connection with the outside world, traumatised by the hunger and death they witnessed at overcrowded public hospitals struggling to cope.
“The patients described how most had been lying in the government hospitals with dead bodies next to them for six hours at a time. The older patients were petrified. They just seen body after body being pushed out of the ward – all their age. And most of them thought that they were going to die.”
One morning, Rogan said she arrived to see one of the older female patients who asked her to bring her bag down from its compartment and open it. In the bag was an assortment of hoarded goods that she had managed to stash instead of eating.
“It’s more food than she’s ever had and she was going back home to her grandchildren and she had to provide for them.”
Working at the facility was initially scary as the long-term ramifications of the disease were unknown, said respiratory physiotherapist Sarah Whitehead.
It was especially so when the effects on different age groups would not always follow the trend. “You would have someone who is 28 years old and really getting affected with serious symptoms, but then you would get an 80-yearold gogo who had no symptoms.”
According to Rogan, some of the long-term effects of the disease that were known posed a bigger threat. The second wave, she said, would probably be all of the noncommunicable diseases that would remain a burden on the strained health system.
Covid-19 affects the pancreas, she explained, and diabetes and heart disease were among the two most dangerous long-term effects.
Elderly patients thought they were going to die