South Africa has nearly 450,000 corona infections. Only the US, India, Brazil and Russia have more positively tested residents. Fighting the spread of corona is complicated by lack of openness and shame.
South African Goodman Makanda (38) first doubted whether he would be tested when he got a sore throat. He was afraid to have corona. His first reaction was to stick his head in the sand. But as a former tuberculosis patient with only one lung, he opted for a test. It was positive. He went into self-isolation in a slum house in the township of Khayelitsha near Cape Town.
After a fourteen-day absence, his neighbors asked where he had been. “Everyone knows each other here, you can’t just disappear,” he says. Now the neighbors get up to sit with them and run away from him without saying anything. “I am corona free but I feel discriminated against. They shut me out.”
More compassion
Goodman is not alone. “This must stop,” President Cyril Ramaphosa recently wrote in a weekly letter to South Africa. He called on South Africans to have more compassion for corona patients. According to him, fear and ignorance lead to people being stigmatized with the virus. Just as happened with HIV, the other infectious disease that hits the country hard with tuberculosis. People with corona are said to have even been kept away from clinics by other neighbors who do not want them there, according to the president.
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