BELOW is the statement by the late Zororo Makamba’s family after he became the first Zimbabwean to succumb to coronavirus at Wilkins Hospital in Harare on Monday.
Zororo was the son of business mogul and Zanu PF politician James Makamba. Family spokesperson Tawanda Makamba, elder brother to Zororo, spoke to Daily News reporter Sindiso Mhlope and below is the verbatim extract.
Zororo was in New York for 20 days and when he came back he had a slight flue, a cold. He then went to his general practitioner and they checked him for coronavirus symptoms and they said he didn’t have them at the time.
He was just told that he had a cough and a flue because in New York it’s cold and here it’s hot, so they then treated him for flue and he came back home.
On Friday last week he started developing a fever and his doctor recommended that he had to be admitted. This is because Zororo had a tumour removed from just under his left lung last year in November and he was under an 18-month recovery time-frame.
His immune system was already compromised, so the doctor was very keen that he gets into the hospital and receives proper medication to help him get over the flue and fever.
He was further advised to go to Wilkins Hospital to test for the coronavirus. He arrived at Wilkins Hospital by 10 am and samples were collected from him and we were told that the results would be in after 6 hours.
After 6 hours there were no results and his general practitioner called to find out why the results had not been availed yet. The hospitals officials then told the GPA that they had not run the tests yet they were waiting for samples from provincial hospitals to run them all at once.
The doctor got frustrated and started questioning why they had not run the tests given that Zororo’s condition was deteriorating. After some time they then decided to run the test and in the meantime we took him home and he needed oxygen.
His GPA phoned around and an ambulance came home to deliver the oxygen and then we got the positive results for coronavirus at about 1:30 or 2:00am the following day.
They told us that now that they had confirmed that he had the virus he had to be taken to the Wilkins Hospital for treatment.
We then inquired if we could bring him immediately and we were told that the hospital was not ready to receive coronavirus patients.
So in the morning we waited and waited and they were still not ready to admit him. He ended up being admitted around 10am and 11am.
His doctor made it clear earlier on that he had to be on a ventilator because he could not breathe. However, when we got at Wilkins Hospital there was no ventilator, no medication and even the oxygen would run out and they had to get it from the City of Harare.
After that we ran around to find a ventilator for him and we managed to get a portable ventilator from a family friend who had a relative who used the ventilator before he died.
In terms of medicine you need to breathe, they didn’t have it there, we had to go and buy it in South Africa. We ended up finding some today (yesterday)just as he was passing away at a local pharmacy, yet the hospital was telling us it was not locally available.
We then brought the ventilator on Sunday by 2pm and when we got here, because the portable ventilator had an American plug, they told us to get an adapter because they only had round sockets at the hospital. I then rushed to buy an adapter and came back and they never used it and when I asked why they were not using the ventilator they said they had no sockets in his room. So they didn’t have medication, ventilators and we brought them a ventilator and they didn’t have sockets in his room. I told them that I had an extension cord and pleaded with them to use the cord, but they refused.
They forced us to come here, but failed to deliver on their promise. When Zororo had his operation, he had it at Health Point Clinic. I contacted the people at Health Point and asked if they were willing to take Zororo in and they said yes and that they had already set up a facility to accommodate him.
