Blantyre District Health Office says it is hunting for COVID-19 positive Malawians who escaped at Kamuzu stadium after their repatriation from South Africa who came using buses.
Addressing journalists on Saturday , Blantyre District Health Officer, Dr Kawalazila said there was misunderstanding when the returnees arrived in the country.
“On Monday, we received 9 buses from South Africa and the procedure was that these people should be tested their COVID-19 status at Mwanza boarder. The buses arrived late at the boarder so there was an issue of taking the people to a safe place so a fast decision was made to take them to Kamuzu Stadium, but at this time the stadium was not ready prepared, so when the people came at place they began complaining about hunger and there was a misunderstanding with them and they left to their homes,”
“We managed to test all the people who came from South Africa, the people were more than 400 and we managed to correct samples from them. From these people, 51 are from Blantyre and from the samples corrected 11 people came with positive results and now we have managed to find 5 of them, that means now the number of positive cases in Blantyre has risen to 36. But we are still looking for the remaining people,” Kawalazila said.
He says the Government has now set up good measures to make sure the returnees are comfortable.
“Currently a good procedure has been made now. We have managed to set school such as chiradzulu Teachers training center and Domasi Teachers training school to be the place where people who have been repatriated will be staying as we are assessing them,”
“In these school we have distributed blankets and food will be available for them to avoid the past mistakes. As Blantyre District office we are doing everything to combat this Pandemic, now we have a Mop up exercise at Mpingwe residential area we are screening each and every house as of now we have managed to screen 111 houses which is half of the houses we are looking for and tested 18 people of which 1 person came out positive, so the pandemic didn’t spread much in this area.” Dr Kawalazira said.
