09 Feb 2021

Ngami District Health Management Team (DHMT) acting coordinator, Dr Sandra Maripe-Ebutswe, says efforts have been made to engage hospitality facilities and mortuaries to iron out the issue of rejection of corpses and tourists who tested positive for COVID-19.

Dr Maripe-Ebutswe, who was responding to some comments during a recent media briefing, admitted that they had challenges where some hotels and lodges designated as isolation centres were reluctant to accommodate tourists who tested positive.

Some private mortuaries, she said, also turned down corpses of COVID-19 positive people.

She cited some incidents where some tourists remained stranded upon arrival at Maun International Airport after testing positive because hotels were hesitant to house them.

However, Ngami DHMT acting coordinator explained that they held discussions with the concerned parties, which produced positive results since some had shown interests to jointly work with them.

 “We have discussed the issue thoroughly with the hospitality facilities and we gave them confidence and capacitate them on how to handled COVID 19 patients. I am happy that some lodges have already accommodated some patients in Maun,” she added.

Dr Maripe-Ebutswe said decision had been made to conduct COVID-19 tests on all arrivals at Maun International Airport regardless of negative results produced by tourists because it was realised that some produced fake results.  

Maun continued to receive tourists, despite experiencing a spike in COVID 19 cases.

Dr Maripe-Ebutswe also said they were experiencing shortage of space at Letsholathabe mortuary, which had a capacity of 12 trays but some private mortuaries came on board following negotiations.

She said it was unfortunate that some mortuaries still refused to take people who died of coronavirus.

The mortuaries, which showered interest to work with the DHMT had been drilled on handling of COVID-19 corpses.

Dr Maripe-Ebutswe was concerned that they were experiencing cluster cases of COVID-19 especially of people using common surnames and investigations had indicated that these people were infected during funerals while others disclosed that they had entertainment sessions as families at their homes.

Currently, Dr Maripe-Ebutswe said about 45 families of which each comprised of more than 15 people had been affected. She reiterated that gatherings were the major contributing factor to coronavirus.

In addition, she stated that the new strain was highly transferable and more infectious noting that they were suspicious that it might be the reason they were having a surge.

On other issues, she noted that the district had received 15 nurses in an effort to address the issue of shortage of personnel.

Recently, the acting coordinator revealed that shortage of personnel hampered their efforts to fast-track contact tracing.

She pointed out that they had also received some volunteers from Red Cross to complement their staff.

Dr Maripe- Ebutswe said efforts were ongoing to engage pastors to provide psychosocial support not only to frontline workers but to patients as well.

Ngami, she said, only had three social workers and they could not cover the whole jurisdiction hence the need to engage pastors. BOPA