Dr Mark Oliver shares his professional views on being healthy and safe when in Covid-19 isolation

The world is filled with a lot of unpredictable factors that many individuals may consider as unfair.

The reality of it all is that living in today’s society is far from cheerful as individuals are faced with more challenges on a regular basis.

Due to the presence of Covid-19, a lot of privileges that individuals had in the past, have been stripped off in order to maintain a safe and healthy environment for everyone. While the government continues to reduce Covid-19 related mortalities with restrictions aimed at controlling the spread of the virus, it is inevitable that individuals will most likely contact the virus even when abiding to the restrictions made by the government.

Despite the impact that the virus has on an individual, the best case scenario is being isolated at home when conditions are not highly severe. As lethal as the virus is, this, however, does not mean the end of the world.

The virus is easily treated with a few safety measures and routines that individuals need to take into consideration when infected.

Dr Mark Oliver, a general practitioner in Morningside took the time to inform the public on the dos and don’ts dealing with Covid-19.

“There are two ways to look at it. 85% of the people may be asymptomatic or mild so if you’re looking for symptoms, eight and a half out of 10 people are likely to have symptoms,” said Oliver.

“That’s not the way we look at the virus. The way we look at the virus is in terms of the people you had contact with, if you know that you’ve had contact with someone that had Covid-19 and any symptoms arise. These symptoms that a person might have are headaches, presence of a sore throat, fever, body pains, lack of smell and taste, diarrhoea and dry coughs. You should have a Covid-19 test when experiencing these symptoms.”

Misconceptions are evidently present as people tend to generalise and base their understanding of the virus through a subjective point of view. Oliver shared his views on the matter.

“The misconception is that people automatically think that you will die when you test positive for the virus. There’s a low percent of people who die from the virus. At an average statistical basis, it’s about 1.7% of people who die from the virus in South Africa. The biggest misconception is that you get Covid-19 and die. If you’re young, healthy and fit, you can still die. That’s the problem. Young people tend to take it likely, but this is no ordinary virus, it’s a whole group of illnesses that comes with the Covid-19 stamp.”

The main safety measures that were addressed by Oliver when maintaining a safe road to recovery during isolation were as listed: drinking enough water (two litres a day), making sure that an individual eats three meals a day which are not sugar based, the monitoring of the body temperature, taking medications such as Panado (three or four times a day) and antihistamine for the fever.

“The treatment of Covid-19 is about monitoring your progressions through your disease. From start to finish and then acting on the change on your clinical condition based on what you are monitoring. The first thing you need to do is check your body temperature, the second is to check your pulse rate and the last thing on the checklist is to check your pulse oximetry, that’s the oxygen saturation of an individual’s blood.”

The doctor concluded that people who were recovering from the virus should not be fully dependent on the medication. “Your immune system kills off the virus and removes it from your system. There’s not much that medication can do. During the recovery time you have to be gentle and patient with your body and avoid any elements of stress while staying at home for a duration of 11 days depending on the progress.”