Malalane Spar employee tests positive for Covid-19

A woman working in a Bureau de Change kiosk in Spar Malalane has tested positive for Covid-19.

Department of health spokesperson Dumisani Malamule confirmed the case on April 2.

According to Lex Hollmann, owner of Spar Malalane, they were notified of the case on Saturday March 28.

“We thoroughly cleaned and sanitised the route that she would have taken,” Hollmann told Lowvelder.

“We are assuming that she contracted the disease through a foreign tourist. If you backtrack, in the time that she would have been exposed to someone with the virus, there were only a few confirmed positive cases in the province. There were, however, many tourist buses in the last weeks before the lockdown.”

She was reported to have her last day at work on March 21 and went to see a doctor on March 23. The woman is said to have travelled with her husband (a manager at one of the shops in the area) and also an outside merchandiser based at Spar.

“The husband has been self-isolating with his wife and we only found out afterwards about the third party involved. Since he is an outside merchandiser and does not work directly for Spar, it was a bit tricky to get into contact with him, but he was also eventually notified to stay home,” Hollmann continued.

Hollmann has been updating locals with YouTube videos every day so far about the status of the store and the situation in general.

“The local department of health visited the store on Monday, March 30 and I have discussed with them the precautions that we have been taking to ensure prevention of transmission.

“We have already installed our sneeze guards at the tills, we sanitise and spray the checkout before and after each customer, we control the amount of customers entering the store and we have also strategically opened pay points so that customers can socially distance themselves from one another.”

According to Hollmann, the allowed number of people in the building is around 375.

“The control process is a continuous learning curve and we are already handling the situation much better in the past few days than when lockdown was first implemented,” Hollmann concluded.