A Date with Rona

 

It is yet another Friday and once again we get to have something to read on this platform. It is always a hard thing to put together a piece when you are just coming from a week in which the article got extremes of feedback. I however decided to go on with the writing as I feel like this article might be helpful to some if not many people.

Covid-19 continues to infect and affect people globally. Here at home, cases are still on the rise and people seem to be living their normal lives with very little modification in the wake of the rising cases and deaths. At first, the excuse was that we needed to settle the election issue but over a month after the election we are still seeing people being resistant to change. There might be many reasons for it but I think the main one is that people do not realize how much Covid-19 could affect their lives and affect the lives of the ones they love.

I have had the privilege of talking to different people about Covid-19. Being in the medical profession, I have had a chance to get closer to what is happening on the front line through colleagues who are working there as doctors, laboratory scientists, nurses, health promoters and many others. Some of them have been taking care of critically ill patients and the stories they have to tell are far from pleasant. Some of those in the front line have gotten infected and shared their experiences and that is one of the reasons for which I decided to add my voice to the osaidelera Covid campaign.

Some of you might know this but I will just highlight it for the sake of those who do not. While I am a qualified medical doctor, I haven’t been as clinically active in the past few years as I was focusing on my research roles at the Malawi-Liverpool Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Program where I work. The coming of the Covid-19 pandemic, however, got me considering a return to clinical duties. Because of the other commitments, I did not make an immediate return but volunteered for a role within Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. In this role, I was not involved in direct patient care but I had to interface the people who did everyday as I was one of the people responsible for facilitating the provision of personal protective equipment to clinical staff at the hospital.

After weeks of work, rumors of how some of the staff at the hospital and our organization had tested positive for Covid-19. We could all see the virus getting closer and closer to us and we continued to do our level best to protect ourselves in the line of work. At the same time, our organization decided to respond to the need for testing by organizing a system for staff testing. Some of us became part of that system as we were involved in the booking and provision of protective equipment to the people who were collecting the samples and in the booking.

Some weeks into this voluntary role at what we just liked to call the PPE office I became unwell. At this time, I had serious episodes of fatigue and I struggled to make it to work on time. I also had general body pains but they were not so serious and I was able to work through them. Being me, I attributed the symptoms I had to exhaustion because I have been working since November without taking a proper break (I usually take a one-week break after working for 3 months). I continued working but at that time, I decided that I was going to maintain minimal contact with people outside my workplace and that I was going to mask up.

On one afternoon, I was handing over the office to the colleague who wad going to man the office for the rest of day when I mentioned how tired I was and how much I needed sleep. At that point, this colleague suggested that I get a test because according to him he had heard me complain about getting tired for the past week or two. Then he began to probe for the other symptoms of Covid-19 and although I had some loss of smell, body pains and fever, I downplayed the symptoms. I however decided to contact the team that follows up people with symptoms and I was immediately placed on self-quarantine. I was to remain home and not be in physical contact with anyone until I got cleared by a negative test. After 3 days of being followed up by a nurse through phone calls I was booked for a Covid-19 test and to keep a long story short, I tested positive for the disease. I was to be in isolation for a minimum of two weeks.

The news of the positive test was not much of a shocker to me because I realized that I may have come in contact with many cases in the line of work although I was not involved in direct patient care. I was, however, worried about how friends and family may receive the news and my worries were confirmed when I talked to my family and better half about it. People were worried and almost made me regret disclosing the news. Two weeks of not meeting people later, I was ready to go out after making a full recovery, and I would like to share some lessons from the experience.

The first lesson is something you have always heard and read; Covid-19 is real. You might go on an argue that so is malaria when you do not have it or when no one in your circle has it, but this is one nasty disease. Even if it does not kill you, the negative effects on your health and productivity are huge. In the time I was in isolation, some friends also disclosed to me that they had tested positive for Covid-19 with varying symptomatologies; some were completely okay while others were bedridden. All of them were not going to work, though and if productivity is not something you worry about, you should consider the possibility of transmitting the disease to your loved ones whose bodies may not handle the disease as well as you may do. For the sake of ourselves and those around us, we need to religiously practice the preventive measures that we have been hearing since the pandemic started.

In the time that I was in isolation and after making my recovery, the most common question has been that of what remedies I was taking to get better. The answer for me is lemon water and ginger but that is not the important bit of this. Covid-19 has come along with a good number of doctors who are wantonly prescribing unproven herbs and supplements that supposedly clear the virus faster and facilitate a quick recovery. While there might be value in the use of some of these herbs, I have a feeling that the desperation brought by the fact that Covid-19 has no cure has people experimenting with concoctions that might be very harmful to a body that is also fighting Covid-19.

When I shared with some friends and family that I was unwell, people decided to share some of those herbs for me to drink and some leaves for me to inhale. Almost each of the parcels that were dropped on my doorstep had a bottle of some concoction that supposedly helped someone to recover in 3 days. For my safety, I did not take such and I would advise that everyone who gets sick remain cautious and stay away from using unproven herbal remedies. I am not sure as to how the people who sent the concoctions will react when they come home and find the bottles with their seals still intact. There is also an issue of using prescription medications like chloroquine and dexamethasone. Some have been buying these drugs to self-medicate after getting news that the drugs work from the mainstream media. These are drugs that have been used in specific populations and they are not entirely safe for use as they have some nasty side effects, some of which are lifelong.

To date, Malawi, a country of 19 million people has done just under 38, 000 tests for Covid-19. We have had over 4900 confirmed cases, but evidence suggests that there could be more cases. Covid-19 may present with the mildest of symptoms and it is easy to downplay the symptoms like I did. Even when you cannot, access to a test may not always be available considering the relatively strict testing criteria. With this there are possibilities that you could get infected and be spreading the disease without knowing it. This whole Covid-19 prevention gig is not just about yourself although it has a lot to do with you.

Here we are, then. I had my date with Rona. I have recovered but being infected with the novel coronavirus brought a lasting change to my psyche (hopefully not to my physique). One of doctor friends, worried as to what the side effects of the Covid-19 might be to the adult male wondered whether we should make hay while the sun shines and go on to copy and paste ourselves. He argued that Covid-19 is a new disease and we may wake up 5 years from now, having survived the pandemic only discover that we are not able to procreate. It was probably the alcohol speaking but this good man raised a very important point. Covid-19 is a new disease whose side effects are not fully known, and it is good to stay safe and not risk it.

I may not have spoken about Covid-19 as a doctor, but here is my experience as a patient. As I sign out, I am imploring you to normalize checking on your friends because there are many people who are all over social media, sharing memes as if everything is okay when they are down with Covid-19. Let us stay safe and religiously practice the preventive measures. If you get it, please do slow down on the herbs and medications because you do not necessarily have to drink every known leaf, bark and root to get better.