49 ISOLATED AFTER MASS SCREENING

MBABANE – At least 49 people were isolated following the mass screening that took place at different roadblocks across the country since Monday.

This is according to the Minister of Health, Lizzie Nkosi, who made this revelation during a briefing at the Cabinet Offices yesterday. She said most of the 49 suspected cases were from the Manzini Region. The minister stated that some of them had their swabs taken at the different roadblocks for testing. She explained that they were all taken for isolation while awaiting their results.

“The results are going to come out tomorrow (today),” she said.
Nkosi stated that there were others who were screened at different homesteads on Monday. The mass screening came after there were increasing numbers of positive cases in the Manzini Region. As of yesterday, there were 48 cases from Manzini alone from the total of 71 confirmed cases in the country.

Roadblocks

The screening is done by police officers at the different roadblocks.
The minister stated that police officers were trained from late February and early March on how to go about doing the tests and identifying individuals with high temperatures.
It was stated that when the police officers screened and found people with high temperatures, they were instructed to call health workers to take the patients for testing.

Normally, the screening procedure in the roadblocks, according to the minister, is that a person is screened, and once the person is found with a high temperature, they are asked to park on the side for a few minutes. This is because the high temperature could be caused by the heaters in vehicles. After a moment, that individual gets tested again and if the readings do not decrease, that individual is then taken for testing.

The average generally acceptable body temperature is 37.5°C.
However, body temperatures can have a wide range, from 36.1°C to 37.2°C. A temperature over 38°C most often means one has a fever caused by an infection or illness.

“We urge people to cooperate with the officers on the ground when asked to step aside for re-screening as that is for their own safety and the people who live with them,” added Nkosi.

She further urged those who were found to have high temperatures during screening if not, to indicate if they did not have alternative isolation rooms at their homesteads and government would isolate them. When asked what determined the region from which one was said to be from when they tested positive, Nkosi said it was their place of residence.  She said they wanted a place of residence as that helped them conduct the contact tracing of people whom a positive case might have been in contact with.

“It’s not based on where your national identity card says you are from but where you reside on a daily basis,” she said.

Infected

She further noted that most of the people who were infected were in the age groups of 20-49 years.  When asked about that, she said it was because this age group moved a lot, some socialising and others being the working class.

“We established that some are partying, and share items such as bottles or glasses, among other things,” she said. Nkosi then encouraged those who were isolated at home and those with flu to use the masks at all times to protect others.   As for the recoveries, the minister said they got to understand that the virus was ‘individualistic’.  Explaining further, she said they had not changed their pattern in terms of treatment for all the patients admitted to the Lubombo Referral Hospital, further stating that it all depended on an individual’s immune system and how they responded to the medication. She said they also did a whole body check-up to see if people had other conditions like diabetes to give them treatment accordingly. Nkosi emphasised that they were continuously doing the tests to identify other people across the country.

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