The ManicaPost
Ray Bande
Senior Reporter
A RAIL-THIN alcohol addict swallows a mouthful of cheap ‘village wine’, popularly known as vhinyu, while puffing on a cigarette that intermittently makes him spew a deep smokers’ cough.
His body parts shake like pieces of wire joined together each time he coughs.
Weary as he looks, somehow he still has the energy to loudly address fellow imbibers packed in a beer hall backyard in one of the suburbs of the city.
Aerosols from his mouth are being sprayed into the air each time he utters a word, thereby leaves his audience not only in need of face masks, but raincoats as well.
Scenarios like these are not peculiar to pleasure seekers.
In most streets, primary and secondary school going children have their own version of similar characters, but in different settings.
Grown up women, busy outshining one another in gossiping contests in street corners, form yet another grouping of Covidiots.
Not to be outdone are primary and high school teachers taking advantage of the lay off from work to make an extra dollar through backyard classes where children – without masks, sanitisers or physical distancing — are flocking to various centres in their numbers ostensibly to cover up for lost learning time.
This is not limited to the poor or the ghettos.
Different kinds of parties are being held behind high pre-cast walls of residential properties in leafy suburbs, while get together gigs far from the madding crowd in resort areas such as Vumba and Nyanga are now a common phenomenon.
The long and short of it all is that Covid-19 precautionary measures are being undertaken in the various communities for legal and official compliance purposes, not due to the understanding of the dangers that come with the pandemic.
Wearing of face masks at public transport pick up points as well as supermarket entry points are evidence of how citizens take Covid-19 precautionary measures as a legal and official requirement, far from it being for their own safety reasons.
Be that as it may, the sad reality is that personal precautionary measures are the be-all-and-end-all in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.
“No nation in the world will be able to control Covid-19 by increasing beds, oxygen, ventilators and ICU wards. This is a temporary, impossible and very expensive solution.
“If healthcare infrastructure was the answer, then developed Western countries wouldn’t have had so many cases and so many fatalities,” wrote one intelligentsia in the medical profession.
Dr Uma Vaidyanathan, the Senior Consultant in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Fortis Hospital, Shalimar Bagh in Dehli, India went on to note that: “The long lasting, inexpensive and quickest solution is physical distancing, wearing masks and maintaining a high level of hygiene to stop transmission. Remember, hospitals are not built to stop toad accidents. Accidents can only be stopped by careful driving.
“It is the behaviour of the people which decides the course of the pandemic.”
Unfortunately, this is the brutal truth!
While the Covid-19 precautionary measures that include physical distancing, sanitisation, wearing of face masks and vaccination are generally being observed for legal reasons, they are in fact the only long lasting and inexpensive way of ensuring eradication, or at least significantly minimising the spread of the virulent disease.
But not even existing legislation put in place has managed to convince the masses of the need to protect themselves against Covid-19.
Thus Officer Commanding Police Manicaland Commissioner, Dr Wiklef Makamache, recently told a gathering attended by heads of Government departments, that non-deterrent penalties are fuelling wanton breaching of Covid-19 regulations.
“It is not an easy exercise to carry law enforcement on a community that believes that their rights are being trampled upon and it also involves deprivation of certain freedoms, but we have managed to cover the length and breadth of the province.
“We have intensified our border patrols for the sake of preventing people from getting into the country through illegal points. In terms of violation of standing regulations, we arrested 4 754 people in January, 3 940 in February and 4 344 in March.
“These figures show that the community is not complying with the regulations. The figures are abnormal.
‘‘Remember it takes the individual and law enforcers to make sure that we control Covid-19 pandemic.
“In terms of challenges, we have non-deterrent penalties and therefore the communities continue flouting laid down regulations. Imagine someone paying a fine of $500. That is why people are continuing to breach regulations,” he said.
Perhaps it is all in the severity of the pandemic in Sub Saharan Africa.
This part of the world is yet to witness what the world witnessed in horror as the Coronavirus raged across India, with hospitals running out of beds, oxygen and medicines.
At that time, the official daily death toll averaged around 3 000 (many claim that the numbers could have been higher than this), with crematoriums and cemeteries running out of space.
But does a nation which prides itself in learned citizenry need to learn the hard way?
Brazil is a good example.
Since Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, the Brazilian government downplayed the threat and vetoed a law that made it mandatory to wear face masks in schools, stores, and prisons.
Their Head of State even tried to get the Supreme Court to stop Governors and Mayors from imposing physical distancing rules.
Brazil’s government invested heavily in drugs that it claimed, without scientific evidence, prevented or cured Covid-19.
Add to that the emergence of a new, more contagious variant of the virus, low vaccine availability, and the country’s situation became dire.
In the midst of all this, the earlier folks grasp the fact that the long lasting, inexpensive and quickest solution to this pandemic is physical distancing, wearing of face masks and maintaining high levels of hygiene, the better for humanity.
