30 Nov 2020

Greater Francistown District Health Management Team (DHMT) public health specialist, Dr Mpho Selemogo has advised the public to embrace home isolation as it is not everyone who will need hospital assistance.

Addressing councillors at the ongoing full council session in Francistown on November 26, Dr Selemogo said the greatest risk of COVID-19 was not only on those with symptoms and identified or contact cases, but on the unidentified cases.

He said testing was necessary to identify those with non-symptoms since screening had that capability of missing possible cases. 

Moreover, Dr Selemogo noted that the public needed to accept that anyone could be a COVID-19 patient and that any surface was potentially contaminated, especially door handles, kettles that were mostly used by a lot of people.

He thereby urged everyone to maintain proper hygiene at all times through regular disinfection since there was an assumption that COVID-19 was in the entire community.

Dr Selemogo said the district had established eight new specimen collection centres being Serule, Tonota, Mathangwane, Tati-Siding, Ntshe, Boikhutso, Kagiso, and Masego. The establishment of the centre, he said, was to increase the testing capacity of the district.

 However, Dr Selemogo said the district was faced with challenges such as fatigue from both the community members and frontline workers, which in turn made the community to slack down in the prevention measures.

 Another challenge, he said, was of lab capacity and logistics, explaining that the process of taking specimen from testing centres to the lab was usually delayed due to lack of transport and even manpower, hence this made the turnaround time to be around four days. 

Despite these challenges, Dr Selemogo said as the district, there were some achievements that they had accomplished so far such as the protection of the vulnerable people through restriction of unnecessary movements.

Further, he said another aspect to be appreciated was improved isolation capacity, noting that the Matsiloje isolation centre’s capacity was 260 and well- resourced.

Also, he said there was improved accessibility to testing and that since the outbreak of COVID-19 the district had only registered two deaths, which he said was commendable.

Dr Selemogo said currently, Francistown had registered 518 cumulative cases with 27 actives in which 26 were at Isolation facilities while one was in home isolation.

Additionally, he said there were 488 recoveries and only two COVID-19 deaths.

For his part, Itekeng ward councillor, Mr Lesego Kwambala expressed concern that there was no proper monitoring for those in home isolation. He said home isolation should be done properly and in a well-planned manner without violating COVID-19 prevention protocols. 

He questioned the health specialist on measures that they had put in place as DHMT to re-inject frontline workers’ mood so that they could be active at work.

Specially elected councillor, Mr Modiri Lucas said it was important to have hand sanitizers at overcrowded places such as bus stations and shopping centers. 

Nominated councillor, Mr Gilbert Boikhutso encouraged DHMT to be well prepared in terms of testing equipment since holidays were approaching and a lot of people were going to travel to different destinations. ends