In the fight against Covid-19, let’s focus beyond Dr Atwine

In the stressing fight against Covid-19, Ugandans now seem to be more focused on Dr Diana Atwine, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Health. However, poor Atwine is a small actor in a global fight for resources to fight Covid-19.

As a civil servant, there may be things she might not say, yet as the top civil service leader of the health sector, she has to give Ugandans hope. Ugandan leaders seem to be stuck with traditional measures of responding to this new challenge. For instances, Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja made an off-the-cuff remark about Ugandans receiving some financial relief. Now the government has to rationalise the remark and adopt it as policy. And thereafter get the money.

In Europe, most of the countries that placed their healthcare at the centre of the fight against Covid-19 ended with the biggest numbers of deaths. It is, therefore, deductible that no healthcare system, however much developed and equipped, would handle this Covid-19 onslaught. 

Is it any wonder that in the UK, the population was rallied ‘to save the NHS’ (the National Health Service)? The population was advised on how to avoid the disease (in order to avoid a situation where the NHS would be overwhelmed by patients). It looks like the UK leadership had already accepted that in spite of their solid healthcare system, it would not be a match for the Covid-19 invasion.

Now, the wave that whipped Europe and other parts of the world seems to have come home. The biggest challenge on the battleground is fear: in my estimation, that has been the biggest weakness in the fight against Covid-19.

In a state of fear (and in a typical Ugandan way), we threw money at the disease; but the disease was not responsive to our money throwing acts. Plus (and importantly): in a period of one year, no amount of money would resurrect Uganda’s hitherto ailing healthcare system to the level where one would place it at the centre of our fight against the Covid-19 onslaught. Even if Dr  Atwine was a magician like me, she would still face challenges; for the gods, this is Covid-19.

I had a conversation with a health worker (surgeon) at Mulago Hospital. The ideas below are influenced by his remarks. 
Instead of creating a hospital based triage system, there should have been a community based one. If you have A, B, C, D, E and F symptoms but not G, H, I, J and K, please stay at home’. We never picked lessons from Europeans. They lost many people because they panicked at the beginning. We were lucky we got the virus later; so we can adopt what worked and abandon what failed in other parts of the world.

Countries that attempted to treat patients in hospitals lost many patients and health workers. No healthcare system can manage such large numbers flooding hospitals. In the USA, six months into the pandemic, they didn’t even have PPEs. Today people are blaming Dr Atwine for the lack of oxygen. I can tell you that with or without oxygen, patients will die if we invite large numbers to hospitals.

What Dr Atwine should do is to learn how to communicate to the public which is now stressed by the lockdown. She should be more open on the challenges facing the health sector. And lastly, she should be more pro-active and speak to Ugandans more directly (not issuing statements responding to critics).

Dr Atwine should prioritise the safety of health workers by providing PPEs, training, allowances (and as a leader, she should give health workers and Ugandans some hope). Even those ICU beds need trained personnel to man them.

Mr Bisiika is the executive editor of the East African Flagpost. [email protected]