‘I feel like I am playing God’
“Watching this virus unfold, hearing or reading about its most recent kill and then going outside and seeing people without masks on their faces — honestly, that’s a spit in the face.”
“I feel like I am playing God because I decide who gets a bed and has a fighting chance of living … and who doesn’t and dies.”
These words, from hospital doctors at the sharp end of the Covid-19 pandemic, are typical of the stress and frustration shared with the Sunday Times by health workers throughout SA.
They also describe their exhaustion, anxiety about the safety of their families, shortages of beds and protective equipment and the prospect of being overrun by patients they will not be able to help when the pandemic peak arrives.
● For 92-year-old Durban GP DR PERISAMY GOVENDER, the words “there will be plenty of time to rest when I am dead” are what he lives by as he soldiers on during Covid-19 despite the risks to his life because of his age.
“Right now I have God’s work to do. When you are not there when the people need you the most, why must they support you in good times? My age has nothing to do with this.”
Govender said he has encountered about 20 suspected cases of Covid-19, all of which have come back negative. Three of his patients tested positive at work and he is managing them from a distance.
He said that what the medical profession is going through now can only be compared to the Asian flu of the ’70s. That was “very trying. We had no cellphones so we would have school children coming to us saying ‘Everybody in my family has the flu,’ ” he said.