Survivors and healthcare workers battle the mental scars of Covid-19

From seeing patients hoarding food and agonising over dependents left at home, patients at Gauteng’s Covid-19 field hospitals taught healthcare volunteers some hard lessons on the ugly truth of being poor and having to depend on a broken healthcare system.

As the Covid-19 pandemic in South Africa descends from its peak, front-liners in the healthcare sector have reflected on their experiences in the thick of a war against an invisible enemy.

Physiotherapists who volunteered at the makeshift hospital at the Nasrec Convention Centre say the virus’ siege on South Africa’s poor has uncovered the shame of a system which has failed its most vulnerable patrons.

According to orthopaedic physiotherapist Terry Rogan, the experience was a hard reality check, as she switched the comfort of her Sandton practice to treat patients in a government facility and realised that some of them were enjoying the privilege of eating at least one full meal per day for the first time in months.

The physiotherapists also often became de facto confidants to the patients, who were desperate for a connection with the outside world, and themselves traumatised by the hunger and death they witnessed at overcrowded government hospitals struggling to cope with the peak of the pandemic.

“The patients described how they had been lying in the government hospitals with dead bodies next to them for six hours at a time. The older patients were petrified. They had just seen body after body being pushed out of the ward – all their age. And most of them thought that they were going to die.”

A nurse exits the decontamination unit as he leaves the Nasrec quarantine/isolation site in Nasrec, 3 July 2020. Picture: Neil McCartney

One morning, Rogan says she arrived to see one of the older female patients who had asked her to bring her bag down from its compartment and open it. In the bag was an assortment of hoarded goods that she had managed to stash instead of eating.

“It was more food than she’s ever had, and she was going back home to her grandchildren and she had to provide for them.”

Working at the facility was initially scary, since the long-term ramifications of the disease were among the many unknowns, says respiratory physiotherapist Sarah Whitehead. It was especially so when the effects on different age groups would not always follow the currently known trend.

“You would have someone who is 28 years old and really getting affected with serious symptoms, but then you would get an 80-year-old Gogo who had no symptoms.”

According to Rogan, some of the longterm effects of the disease that were currently known posed a bigger threat. The second wave, she said, would probably be all of the non communicable diseases that would remain a burden on the strained health system.

One of the effects of the disease is it affects your pancreas, she explains. Diabetes and heart disease were among the two most dangerous long term effects of the disease, she explains. The role of physiotherapy would include assistance with long term lung and neurological problems which were also emergent side-effects.

But while most of the reported long-term effects of the virus affect the body, the volunteers predict that trauma of facing mortality in isolation was among the lesser known, yet extremely serious consequences of being a critical or intermediate patient at a Covid-19 field hospital.

According to Gauteng Health Department spokesperson Kwara Kekana, the quarantine & isolation site, and field hospital at Nasrec was still operational, though many volunteers had ended their stay. The facility would be remaining open, mostly in case a second surge were to break out following the start of Level 1 of the lockdown. After peaking at over 200,000 cases in July, Gauteng had 87,033 recorded cases, as of Monday.

Simnikiweh@citizen.co.za

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.