Beatific Gumbwanda
CHIREDZI – A Tongaat Hulett Zimbabwe (THZ) employee, Tatenda Mudawarima
(38) who was on August 18 admitted to Hippo Valley Medical Centre after testing
positive for coronavirus on a Rapid Diagnostic Testing (RDT) kit, has died of
Covid-19.
His Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)
results, which were delivered a few hours before his death, confirmed that he
was indeed coronavirus positive.
Meanwhile two more THZ employees
have tested positive for the virus, bringing the total number of cases at the
company to four and 13 for the whole district as on August 19.
One of the 13 cases in the
district is a driver at Nyaradzo Funeral Services and one is a staff member at humanitarian relief organisation Care International Zimbabwe. (before the update, this article had wrongly stated that a staff member at Christian Care, rather than Care International Zimbabwe, had tested positive for coronavirus. The mix-up is regretted).
This came out at a Covid-19
Response Project meeting organised by Africa Ahead where Chiredzi General
Hospital executive staff Lovemore Manyanye spoke on behalf of District Medical Superintendent
Dr David Tarumbwa.
“We have recorded one
Covid-19 fatality from a record of 13 positive cases in the district. PCR tests
which are being sent to Bulawayo are taking long to be delivered back,”
said Manyanye.
Specimens for Chiredzi district
are sent to the National Tuberculosis Reference Laboratory in Bulawayo for
testing.
The specimen of first case which
was reported by THZ took 10 days to come out, making effective contacts tracing
work harder if not impossible.
