For many South Africans, the Covid-19 statistics released each night are numbers. But for a Durban nurse, one of those numbers has a face - a face that she loved for 28 years.
“We look at the numbers on TV and everyone is saying the numbers are not too bad. But until you can humanise that number and put a face to it, one person who gets it and dies is one too many. My husband couldn’t breathe. The machine had to breathe for him for 29 days. He is never coming back,” said Tracy Harman.
Harman’s husband, Anton, an operational specialist trainer at the SA Revenue Service, died on May 21.
Tracy, a nurse at Durban's St Augustine's Hospital, and her daughter tested positive a few days after he did. They did not know where they contracted the virus.
Though their symptoms were mild, Anton's fever wouldn’t break. When he went to hospital on April 22, she told him: “You'll come back to me, OK?”.