Is South Africa Equipped To Handle Such A Crisis?

Faced with a severe shortage of oxygen, India choked for breath at the height of its catastrophic covid-19 pandemic peak in April and May. Critical medical oxygen is usually the first resource to run low during respiratory emergencies. Currently in its third wave and with talk of an impending fourth wave, is South Africa equipped to handle such a crisis?

- Chanel Retief

On a bleak Sunday afternoon in late June in Johannesburg, South Africa, Dr Anne Biccard, while on a particularly arduous shift, watched three young people being rushed into the emergency department gasping for oxygen. They had Covid-19, and the hospital, already bursting at the seams with pandemic patients, had no available ventilators.

The immediate solution would have been to plug the new patients to oxygen concentrators, but unfortunately, the hospital could not find an extension cord to plug them into.

“On a Sunday afternoon, where do you think we were going to find one,” Biccard asks. “Silly things like that seem to be like insurmountable challenges.”

The hospital was left with no choice but to try something they had never done before.

“We had to take the equipment from theater – the anesthetic equipment that we use to put patients under and use that to ventilate the patients in the casualty,” Biccard recounts to FORBES AFRICA.

In dealing with the third wave of the pandemic in South Africa, which Biccard says has been worse than the first (July 2020) and second waves (January 2021), hospitals have been overwhelmed and breathless themselves.

Biccard takes a break from the pandemonium in the emergency room to catch her own breath outside as we speak.

“In the first wave, we saw what was happening overseas and were much better prepared… It’s crazy out here! This is my life right now; all of our lives!”