South African public healthcare workers dispersed into the buzzing streets of Johannesburg’s Yeoville neighbourhood as Africa’s worst virus-hit country rolled out mass door-to-door testing for COVID-19.
Armed with screening questionnaires and testing kits, medics and volunteers set up their testing station on the front porch of a block of flats in the gritty business neighbourhood.
Nurse Xola Dlomo told AFP they were asking one resident to mobilise fellow flat dwellers to come for screening and tests.
“They’ve been coming for screening and they are even open to testing if they have symptoms,” Dlomo said.
Already in a 21-day lockdown, South Africa is now embarking on the widespread testing and quarantine campaign involving some 10,000 field workers who are being sent out into homes in villages, towns and cities to screen for symptoms.
The testing plan to break the chain of infection appears to be modelled on the South Korean strategy which saw the Asian country bring the outbreak under control.
South Africa has so far reported nine deaths and 1,585 infections, but Health Minister Zweli Mkhize has warned that the relatively small growth in numbers was perhaps “the calm before a heavy and devastating storm”.
In Yeoville — a crime-prone area in Johannesburg’s hardscrabble central business district — eight small groups have been dispatched across an area covering one square kilometre.
“The health of our people is our first consideration,” said Kegorapetse Ndingandinga, overseeing the Yeoville team.
Scaling up testing
With his head tilted back, 58-year-old Michael Moshone, braced for his nasal swab, seated on a brick staircase in Yeoville.
“It is a little bit uncomfortable but you’ve got to be strong… because you want to know exactly what is going on with you,” Moshone, wrapped in a green, gold and black scarf, said after his sample was taken.
Before the rollout of mass screening and testing, more than 47,500 tests had been performed, 6,000 of them at public health centres.
But for the heath minister, that number is too low for a country of 57 million people where several million have underlying conditions such as HIV and TB.
The turnout was slow on the first day on Friday, Dlomo said.
