The chaos obtaining at the Beitbridge border post where several people have died in the past few days while waiting in long unmoving queues is a cause of great concern.
Reports from Beitbridge put the number of people that have died at the border in the past four days at 15. While all the incidents are reported as cases of sudden deaths, the causes are variously stated as mostly fatigue and exhaustion with one case of a suspected heart complication.
Medical experts will, however, tell you that mere exhaustion and fatigue will not kill people at that rate.
What is worrying, however, is the situation at the border where many thousands of people are stranded on both sides of the border creating conducive conditions for the spread of Covid-19, especially amid fears of a new, more deadly coronavirus strain said to have emerged in South Africa.
The Zimbabwean government, meanwhile, appears more concerned about the fast clearance of people from the border — to clear the queues as fast as possible, apparently without much attention given to the spread of Covid-19.
The information coming from the government is about their unease over the little movement of queues on the South African side, a concern that nearly degenerated into a major diplomatic tiff between the two countries as authorities exchanged unkind words over the speed at which the queues were moving.
We had Zimbabwean authorities publicly bragging and posting pictures of fast-moving queues on the Zimbabwean side and other pictures showing apparent stagnation of queues on the South African side. We are not told anything about the Covid-19 screening of this massive human traffic on the Zimbabwean side.
Frustrated by this official berating, the SA authorities then appeared to have given up on their efforts to screen people — making remarks about their concern being more over the safety of their own citizens and therefore relaxing the screening and allowing Zimbabweans, infected or not, to go back to their country.
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Consequences of such an attitude to health by our government are regrettable. Ever since the festive influx of returnees at Beitbridge border post, the noise has only been about the speed of the queues. In fact, there haven’t been many reports of people being held for quarantine at the border as used to be the case.
Unconfirmed reports say most quarantine centres are no longer functional and have been closed because the facilities have run out of food, medicines and other requirements for fully functional isolation centres.
Given the new Covid-19 variant that is said to have developed in SA, it is important that the government takes the safety of citizens more seriously than seeking to boast about clearing border queues quickly.
Clearing people to enter the country from South Africa fast is one thing, but dealing with a Covid-19 infection explosion is quite another.
