As the ambulance bounces across the rain-drenched streets of southern Johannesburg, a faint line of sweat gathers on Saaberie Chishty paramedic Clive Moeleso’s forehead.
Dressed in full personal protective equipment (PPE), Moeleso and his partner hurtle through mid-Tuesday afternoon traffic. The pair have just received a call, regarding a suspected Covid-19 case in Lenasia.
“Not a day goes by without transporting a positive Covid patient,” Moeleso says.
The paramedics arrive at a small flat shared by Shahid Manjra and two friends. Manjra is having difficulty breathing, as well as displaying other typical symptoms related to the Covid-19 virus.
Their first action before screening the patient for Covid-19 is to help Manjra regulate his breathing.
Between harsh coughs the paramedic can be heard saying: “Can I help you? Hello sir ... listen to me. Hold your breath in. Take a deep breath and hold it in.”
According to the paramedics, people often experience anxiety attacks when they think they have the coronavirus and see the PPE-clad paramedics walking through the door.
The paramedics often encounter people who believe as little in the virus as they believe in maintaining Covid-19 regulations.
“Some people don’t believe it is real. They say it’s just a hoax until they experience it,” Moeleso says.
Moeleso contracted the virus himself after a colleague tested positive.
Moeleso says the fear associated with confined spaces and the coronavirus is something the paramedics have become all too used to, but the fear of passing it on to a loved one is not something the paramedics can grow accustomed to.
“It affects you when you might give it to someone you love, like who is closer to you,” Moeleso says.
After screening the patient, the paramedics wait to be told which nearby hospital can accommodate the patient. At the hospital the patient will take a Covid-19 test.
At Tembisa hospital near Tshwane, head of internal medicine Dr Portia Ngwatha says fighting the second wave of Covid-19 has left staff feeling like fatigue is their baseline.
“I personally haven’t taken leave from 2020 until today. My staff only take leave when they are sick. We’ve got continuous fatigue.”
“We are young doctors with small children who still need time with their parents, and I’m trusting that God will protect me through this,” Ngwatha says.
Ngwhatha, who oversees some 60 doctors in the hospital who work heavily in the hospital’s Covid wards, says the hospital had adopted a three-day-on, two-day-off rotating schedule for front-line staff during the second wave of the pandemic.
During the first wave the hospital recorded an estimated 11,000 admissions with coronavirus infections. During the second wave, the number rose to 15,000.
During the first wave, sister Lydia Dikeledi Mathibela worked closely with coronavirus patients in the hospital’s repurposed family medicine ward.
“I cried in my car, while on duty. Knowing that I’d seen someone and did everything I could as a nurse, only to realise that person’s condition was not OK,” she says, describing her initial period in the wards.
The mother of an 18-year-old son, Mathibela says she feared for the safety of her family during the first wave.
“I told myself I’m going to lose my family, maybe I’ll even die,” Mathibela says.
Covid-positive patients have a poor prognosis when diseases such as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) or pneumonia are present, says Ngwatha.
The doctor says she had resuscitated many Covid positive patients with severe ARDS and had to plead with patients’ families as nothing more could be done to save the patients’ lives.
“Patient has been on oxygen, patient has been on antibiotics, patient has been on early incubation. You’ve escalated the oxygen need, but you still lose the patient. You ask yourself what you could have done,” she says.
Tembisa hospital had 126 deaths during the peak of the first wave, with that number going up to 132 during the peak of the second wave.
The mortuary experienced an increased influx of bodies and was at times above its 66-body capacity, according to mortuary attendant, Mohlabi Siti.
“We are liaising with the forensic pathology department. A plan is in process that they’ll bring mobile fridges.”
Siti says it’s become increasingly difficult working in the mortuary, as the virus has caused the death of community members, friends and relatives.
“It’s stressful but what can we do? We’re community workers and have to be here at the end of the day,” he says.
Speaking on the first wave of the pandemic, Sitit says: “I was so stressed I couldn’t even sleep at night and during that period even my grandmother passed away here.”
In Lenasia, Aboo Sayed and the Saaberie Chishty Burial Society team struggled with an excess influx of deaths during the second wave.
Taking a call on an overcast morning at Lenasia cemetery, Sayed can be heard saying: “It’s beginning to fall now, it’s beginning to fall now these numbers. It’s a bit heavy now, it’s taking a toll on us.”
According to Sayed, funerals at Lenasia cemetery went up to about 90 monthly during the second wave.
“I think the difficulty for most people experiencing this Covid-19 pandemic is that when you get do get it, when you go to hospital — you’re alone. Unfortunately when the numbers are up like this no-one visits you and you are not allowed to visit your loved ones. It’s been a long time for many where their loved ones are in hospital, and then they pass on.”
“When they do pass on the closure is difficult, because people haven’t seen their loved ones, haven’t been with their loved ones in the last moments of their lives.”
Sayed’s voice cracks and tears well up as he recounts a funeral that took place the day before, when only two siblings attended the funeral of a loved one, crying by the gravesite.
Nobody else from the family was in attendance, as the entire family was infected with coronavirus.
“It broke our hearts and we realised we need to be stronger for them.”
The society has carried out over 250 Covid related funerals since the start of the pandemic.
Started in 1982, the society provides Islamic funerals in Lenasia, Eldorado Park, Ennerdale, Soweto and Poortjie and, according to their website, “all informal settlements around Lenasia and wherever called upon”.
The pandemic hit close to home for Sayed as he lost his father and uncle to the virus within 24 hours during the first wave.
Sayed hopes to carry on the work of the late Abbas Sayed, his father and late chairperson of the society.
After a quiet prayer next to his father’s grave, Sayed turns and says: “I put all these processes in place, only to realise that God put them in place to be a comfort to me and my family.”
