Over 168 thousand cases, more than 2,840 deaths; age group most affected: that between 60 and 69 years with 717 deaths; area with the highest number of infections (about 64,500): the Western Cape. These are some data from the Covid pandemic of South Africa which, as all over the world, spread a veil on dramas such as that of doctors called to cynically choose who can live thanks to a pulmonary ventilator or an oxygen cylinder and who should instead die suffocated by his absence. This was recalled by statements by a Belgian doctor of Doctors without Borders (MSF), Eric Goemaere, who works in a field hospital set up in a sports hall in Khayelitsha, a poor township in the metropolitan municipality of Cape Town.
"We have to make tough decisions," he told the BBC. "There is no point in sending extremely serious cases back to the referral hospital since they have no staff or machinery. Hospitals in this region cannot cope," added the doctor, according to the British broadcaster's website. These terminal patients are given "palliative care" in "a corner of the building, while the precious oxygen supplies are reserved for those considered to have the best chance of recovery", the website writes. The MSF structure acts as a support for a hospital with 300 beds that has always been suffering from a shortage of nurses and which has had to triple the number of doctors, transforming itself into an "all-Covid" facility. But "we have a lot of infected staff", notes the head of Medicine, Ayanda Trevor Mnguni, noting that "most of our nurses have become patients".
