Spare a thought for our health workers

This is a strange time in a strange year. For many of us, holiday plans have been torpedoed by new Covid-19 restrictions; for others, we have willingly curtailed our movements to stay safe. But all of us feel the stress.

Now is the time to appreciate the frontline people, the health workers, who are under massive psychological and emotional stress from seeing people dying from Covid-19, but are also physically burned out from the long hours and hard work in ICUs and general wards. Many health facilities – both government and private – are being overwhelmed.

Health workers include those doing the vital work in laboratories of carrying out, and verifying, Covid-19 tests. They won’t have a Christmas and New Year off to celebrate. There is a tsunami of tests to be done and checked.

Their commitment and sacrifice is appreciated by those of us who understand the severity of the threat, which is facing not only South Africa, but many other countries.

Sadly, disappointingly, the Covid-19 denialists are still out there, trumpeting their fake news and conspiracy theories all over social media. They refuse to acknowledge that Covid-19 kills; to them it’s “just a flu, bro” and, for the more extreme among them, all part of a plot by shadowy forces to take over the world.

Many of these fake news peddlers have now turned their attention to vaccines, which are now being rolled out across the world. Many denialists, ironically, would not be alive today, if not for the vaccines administered to them as children and which have helped eradicate some of the most serious diseases known to humankind.

Vaccines will not change your DNA. They will not allow you to be tracked by George Soros or Bill Gates. But they might help you live and ease the burden on our overworked health professionals.

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