Coronavirus: Your Questions Answered

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 the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands 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 nine other 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. Six of the group come from KZN while the seventh was diagnosed in Gauteng. It wasn’t known how many others they’d infected.

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 with whom the infected South Africans might have come into contact.

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.