- Covid-19 callouts have replaced those for trauma victims, say Cape Town paramedics.
- More of their patients are young people compared to the first wave of the pandemic.
- They do not know when they will receive vaccinations.
For Cape Town ambulance paramedics Claire* and Mike*, the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic has been relentless. Suspected Covid-19 patients have replaced gunshot, stabbing and car accident victims and each day is grimly the same.
"Everyone we transport nowadays is a PUI [person under investigation]; we have to assume they have Covid-19," said Claire as she wiped down the interior of the ambulance.
It is just after 21:00, and she and her colleague, Mike, have just delivered an elderly woman to the emergency room of a Cape Town private hospital. "Each shift, we make six or seven calls, and recently 90% of these are suspected Covid-19 cases."
These days, the ambulance crew must spend about an hour cleaning their vehicle after handing over a patient to a hospital.
Every surface and each item in the back of the ambulance is scrubbed to prevent transmission of the virus.
"We don't want to give it to someone who hasn't got it," said Claire.
She said:
She added patients' family members were sometimes frustrated by the extra precautions the paramedics used and did not always understand why they have to take the time to don the PPE before they could assess or treat a patient.
But the paramedics cannot afford to take any risks.
Before the pandemic, said Claire, "when we would come across a patient with blood oxygen saturation stats at 58, we would know that they would be dead within five minutes without urgent care".
A healthy person's blood oxygen saturation levels fall between 94 and 100. Below this level, a person is considered hypoxic. But with the spread of Covid-19, the paramedics regularly encounter "happy hypoxics" who seem alert and will chat away happily while technically starved of oxygen.
Claire told GroundUp these patients generally responded well to oxygen, and their blood saturation usually improved once the paramedics start administering oxygen, though they still remained in serious condition while under the paramedics' care.
Mike said a couple of weeks ago, he and a colleague attended to a patient whose blood oxygen levels were 25, and who was still talking normally.
Trauma callouts all but stopped under Level 5 lockdown, he added.
Then, as restrictions were eased, paramedics received more callouts to respond to gunshots, stabbings, and car accidents.
With the return of Level 3 restrictions, trauma cases have effectively vanished, replaced by a steady stream of Covid-19-related medical emergencies.
Both speak of Covid fatigue, in particular as it relates to the types of callouts they face every shift.
Pre-Covid, a key element of their job would be the unexpected, now most callouts are grimly similar.
Neither could have imagined that their job would come to be like this.
"If this is what it's going to be like, I'm starting to think I should have studied for a B.Com instead," joked Mike. Claire said she could see the effect of the pandemic on hospital staff as wards were overrun with Covid-19 cases.
She said:
Claire and Mike have not heard anything concrete about when or how they would receive vaccinations.
As frontline healthcare workers, they fall in the priority group announced by the health minister, but they have both taken note there were not enough doses of the first round of vaccines to cover all frontline health workers.
They have praise for the way their employers have handled the pandemic.
They said they were always kept up-to-date on the latest developments, they have always had enough PPE, their PPE provisions have kept up with the latest recommended standards, and the length of their shifts - 12-hours - had not been affected by the demands of the pandemic.
The paramedics added everyone was learning new things about this virus every day, and they shared everything with their colleagues. Despite the routine and relentlessness, both Claire and Mike spoke of their job with pride.
Claire said:
She caught Covid-19 in the first wave of infections.
Claire lives at home, and with careful distancing and containment, kept her family from being infected too. She recalled that as word of her sickness spread around her community, her family received many offers of help.
Mike has not caught Covid-19 as far as he knows.
"Each time I return home from work, I wonder if today I might be giving my wife and two kids the virus - it's a worry," he told GroundUp.
* Not their real names
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