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Mail & Guardian reports that public-sector worker unions claim about 150 staff members at Cape Town’s Tygerberg Hospital have to date tested positive for the Covid-19 virus. Nursing staff from different areas of the hospital have been negatively affected by the Western Cape’s exponentially increasing number of positive cases.
“I have to mentally prepare myself every day,” one nurse observed. Although she’s not borne the brunt of the outbreak just yet, being on the front lines of the medical response is starting to take its toll on the 30-something nurse: “You only have so much mental energy to deal with so much every single day. I will never refuse an assignment; I will always help. But you reach a point where you just feel exhausted. Another nurse, who works in the intensive care ward, which is the epicentre of the medical response in the Western Cape, if not SA, detailed the mental strain of working in the hospital considered the ground-zero of treating coronavirus patients. “Nothing in our training prepared us for this … I have experience in dealing with infectious disease, but this is not the same.” Of the six healthcare workers in the Western Cape who have died from Covid-19, two were working at Tygerberg hospital. The head of the Western Cape department of health, Keith Cloete, said they were regularly meeting with labour unions to brief them on the plan to fight the virus. He also indicated: “The anxiety is not about policy. The anxiety is people feeling tired and anxious. We [are] backing that up with support [for nurses] and we may need to bring in more psychosocial and psychological support.”
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Lester Kiewit at Mail & Guardian
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