COVID-19 disease - The African Mirror

May

2022

How South Africa is integrating COVID into routine care for mothers and babies

COVID-19 has had a direct impact on maternal mortality. Pregnant women are not at an increased risk of becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2. But data show they are at higher risk of severe COVID-19 disease. This is especially the case in the last 12 weeks of pregnancy, and this is still the case two years into the pandemic. Authors JEANNETTE WESSELS, Researcher, Centre for Maternal, Fetal, Newborn and Child Health Care Strategies, University of Pretoria UTE FEUCHT, Associate Professor in Paediatrics, University of Pretoria In South Africa, this risk equated to an additional 16 COVID-19-related maternal deaths per 100,000 live births,…

Dec

2020

By The African Mirror

Farewell “Mshini Wam”, an orator of note, with a razor sharp mind and a quick rejoinder

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

MATHATHA TSEDU ON April 6, 1991, a guerrilla unit of the Azanian National Liberation Army (Azanla), the armed wing of the then exiled Black Consciousness Movement of Azania (BCMA), was in a house in Mahwelereng township in Limpopo when police and army forces surrounded them. A shootout ensued during which a number of cops were killed. One of the unit members was Thabang Mothlodisi, a Polokwane-based trade unionist who hailed from Maokeng township in Kroonstad, whilst the other was Ronald Mashapu Malatji. Motlhodisi, known as “Cobra”, came out of the surrounded house with a grenade without the pin. A policeman…

Dec

2020

By The African Mirror

How COVID upended life as we knew it in a matter of weeks

COVID-19

ALEXANDRA HUDSON ON January 1, 2020, as the world welcomed a new decade, Chinese authorities in Wuhan shut down a seafood market in the central city of 11 million, suspecting that an outbreak of a new "viral pneumonia" affecting 27 people might be linked to the site. Early lab tests in China pointed to a new coronavirus. By January 20 it had spread to three countries. For most people, it was a minor health scare unfolding half a world away. Nearly a year later it has changed lives fundamentally. Almost everyone has been affected, be it through illness, losing loved…