Govt’s Covid-19 campaigns ‘falling on deaf ears’ – Limpopo Health MEC

Speaking to Jacaranda FM News on the province’s effort to curb the spread of Covid-19, Ramathuba said although the provincial government has intensified its awareness campaigns, people are simply not paying attention.

“We are one of the provinces that are currently hit mainly because of the visitors we have seen and because most of Limpopo citizens during the year are in other provinces and now, they are at home and we have tried to send messages.

“We have tried putting campaigns from when they started travelling back home on the 11th, we put a campaign in roadblocks working jointly with community safety and transport to be able to say that as you are coming back home please protect your loved ones.

“We try our level best as the government, unfortunately, we are not getting any buy-in from our people. There is so much arrogance from the people when you even try to advise them you will be called names. We do understand it is the nature of human beings, but we are saying this time around can we for once stop calling each other names but focus on protecting ourselves, it cannot be government’s responsibility alone.”

GATHERINGS AND ALCOHOL

Ramathuba says family gatherings are also responsible for the surge in cases.

“We are also discouraging family gatherings, this thing of wanting to meet each other must stop.

“People will be visiting each other from different villages where they are coming to have this family gathering, we are discouraging them and we are saying these family gatherings are a source of the spike we have seen.

“The other issue is alcohol, we are receiving a lot of burnouts because of road accidents happening at night because people are drunk, they are not respecting the curfew, they are in shebeens until early hours of the morning.

“This alcohol thing is not really helping us because people who drink alcohol you can’t even reason with them, they insult you so that is why we are saying the influence of alcohol is not assisting, it is worsening the situation, people get infected in those shebeens, and when they get injured, we run to help them, they are currently occupying our beds which were reserved for our Covid-19 patients.”

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HEALTH CARE WORKERS

The MEC says fatigue among healthcare workers is another big concern.

“Our healthcare workers, these are soldiers who have never been on leave since the beginning of hard lockdown in March, they have never seen a holiday and this is the time they thought the cases will drop and they will go on holiday, we have recalled those who have gone on holiday to come back.

“The fatigue is huge, and we are really dealing with the resurgent from the weekend point because of alcohol, so this is the time for people to do their part and take this serious.”