Why not consider provincial lockdowns?

Dear Editor,

FIRST, allow me to thank the minister of Health, Dr. Chitalu Chilufya and his team for their splendid, relentless and tremendous amount of work they are putting in 24/7 to ensure that Covid-19 is controlled and lives are protected.

The ministry will surely have great difficulties in managing the spread of Covid-19 if movements at provincial level are not controlled.

It will be extremely wise to restrict movements from one particular province to the other in the next 14 days if we want to control and manage Covid-19 cases from skyrocketing, because clearly every time we have an update, numbers keep increasing.

Zambia has a population of plus/ minus 17, 000, 000 a clear indication that if difficult and radical decisions are not made we will surely have a much more worse disaster in an event that the diesease is not controlled in terms of spreading to remote areas.

I am reliably informed that out of 10 provinces, we seem to only do the testing from Lusaka meaning the rest depend on the manpower from Lusaka, an indication that we may have more cases that may not have been detected due to manpower and lack of sufficient testing equipment thus posing a great danger to so many lives.

My humble appeal to our hardwoking minister is for him to consider putting provinces on lockdown for 14 days to minimise movements of people which clearly is acting as a conduit of fast spreading Covid-19 in areas that may not have the pandemic.

I also appeal to the government to consider setting up provincial testing centres, a situation that will give us correct numbers and statistics in terms of Covid-19 cases.

Putting the provinces on lockdown will not only restrict movements but also confine the pandemic to specific areas affected making it easy for the Ministry of Health to detect the exact number of cases per each region thereby giving as correct statistics and to manage the spread of Covid-19.

Zambians are stubborn by nature. Telling them to keep social distances alone or washing their hands with soap will not help at all but see the number of cases skyrocketing.

MAXWELL CHONGU, PF DIE HARD.