Covid-19 kills 14th health worker

Dr Micheal Musiitwa Mugwanya reportedly succumbed to Covid-19. PHOTO/COURTESY.

What you need to know:

  • Dr Michael Mugwanya died on Wednesday aged 46.

The district health officer of Kiboga District has become the 14 health worker in the country to succumb to Covid-19. 

Dr Michael Mugwanya passed away on Wednesday aged 46.
He has been acclaimed as a very hardworking and dedicated doctor.

According to his colleagues, in 2005, Dr Mugwanya was medical officer at Bukomero Health Centre IV in Kiboga District. At the time, the district was extremely rural.

“He and other colleagues came into the wilderness that was Kiboga right from medical school with their young families, worked in deeply rural health facilities with no mobile network, extremely rough roads, and understaffed in the land of ‘Nakawunde’,” Mr Roy Mayega, a friend of the deceased, said in his tribute.

He added: “They worked with budgets of Shs250,000 for health centre II, Shs750,000 for health centre III, Shs4 million for health centre IV per quarter from primary healthcare conditional grant at a time when cost sharing was abolished.”

This photo taken on December 10, 2020, shows burial proceedings of deceased Dr Musiitwa who died from Covid-19. PHOTO/COURTESY. 

He was later made the medical superintendent of Kiboga General Hospital and later became the DHO.

Mr Mayega also said Dr Mugwanya survived a kidney transplant undertaken about 10 years ago and later returned to Kiboga extremely focused on his work.

Uganda has registered at least 1,566 confirmed Covid-19 cases among health workers. Out of these, 14 deaths have been reported in different categories of medical workers.

Some of the other health workers that have died due to Covid-19 include Eunice Chimatala, the first health worker in the country to succumb to the pandemic, Yasin Kiyimba, Peter Mugisha, among others.

Currently, the country is in stage four of the pandemic. In just two days, the country has recorded 1,361 coronavirus cases. This comes at a time when most members of the public have stepped back from observing the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to stop the spread of Covid-19.
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