COVID-19: What You Should Know

As Covid-19 is diagnosed in SA, we asked experts about how worried we should be and how we can protect ourselves

- Jane Vorster

FEAR, panic, confusion, anger – it’s easy to feel overwhelmed as more South Africans are being diagnosed with a virus that’s caused countries to go into unprecedented lockdown in an effort to contain it.

But as shown by the first man in South Africa to have tested positive for Covid-19 – the strain of coronavirus that’s caused alarm across the globe – being infected doesn’t mean the end of the world.

He’d been back in SA for a few days when he suddenly started feeling ill. And when he went to see his doctor, he was given the bad news: it wasn’t just ordinary flu he’d contracted on his travels.

As news broke of the unnamed man from KwaZulu-Natal who’d been diagnosed after returning from a trip to Italy, many South Africans couldn’t help but feel worried.

By this point, the 38-year-old father of two had already spent time with his family, been on planes with hundreds of strangers as well as the group of 10 people he was travelling with, and he’d been to the doctor – which means they were all at risk of having the disease too.

At the time of going to print, his wife and five other members of his travelling party had also tested positive. It wasn’t known how many others they’d infected but 18 people were in quarantine.

Of course, getting the virus doesn’t automatically mean you’ll die. Yet with more than 100 000 confirmed cases in around 80 countries and more than 3 500 deaths, the numbers are scary.

This is why local authorities are now doing everything they can to isolate all those whom the infected South Africans might have come into contact with.

From watching what’s been happening in the rest of the world, we’ve seen what it might mean if the virus isn’t contained.