By Mabinty M. Kamara
Some residents under quarantine in Freetown have accused officials of the National Covid-19 Response Team of neglect and discrimination, which they say have made life in isolation unbearable.
Besides prolonged delay in providing test results, which lengthens the period people spend in quarantine, the EOC is also accused of failing in its responsibility of providing support in the form of food or medication for people in quarantine.
Joseph Sesay, a Landlord in Portee in the east end of Freetown, was subjected to quarantine alongside 28 people in his compound for nearly a month. They ended their second round of 14-day quarantine on May 21.
Sesay told Politico that the compound had to be quarantined after a nurse, who resides there and worked at the Princess Christian Maternity Hospital, tested positive for Covid-19. He said they had to go without any government support for food for the first two days of their quarantine period, noting that they barely made it through this period thanks to the support of neighbors.
According to Sesay, throughout the quarantine period they only had support from government twice. Most of the support, he noted, came from private organizations.
But the most agonizing experience of the landlord, according to him, was watching his wife go through an attack due to a pre-existing medical experience without help.
“I told them (EOC) that my wife has diabetes, high blood pressure and Ulcer. But throughout the quarantine period, not a single medication was given to her,” he explained.
He said he only got the attention of the EOC after he threatened to break quarantine to get medication for his wife.
Sesay and his tenants say over a week since they were discharged, they were still yet to be issued a discharge certificate indicating their status.
“They collected our samples on the 19th and on the 21st we were discharged without any certificate. So, I asked them if we were not getting any discharge paper, but they said they will come back. But up till now I haven’t seen or received the certificate,” he said in an interview on Friday, 29 May.
The dire situation characterizing quarantine homes in Sierra Leone is no secret. The Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone last week captured this in a damning report in which it urged the government to work on fixing them.
Allieu Alghali, who is in quarantine at his residence at Black Hall Road, Kissy, has been in quarantine for over 28 days now. He told Politico that throughout this period he has barely received food from anyone - neither government nor NGOs.
Like Sesay in Portee, a relative of Alghali’s co-tenant tested positive for the Coronanirus, leading to the entire compound been quarantined. He said after 14 days since samples were collected from them, he was informed that his daughter had tested positive.
But Alghali refused to hand over his daughter for treatment because he said he had doubts about the authenticity of the test results.
“After the first 14 days, our swabs were taken and then they later came to inform me on the 16th of May that my kid was positive. But I asked for the test result which they never produced. So I told them I was not going to allow any medication to be administered to my kid or for her to be taken to treatment center, if there was no document to prove it; like a copy of the test result. So they threatened that they would forcefully take the kid if I resisted. But as I speak, today is the 12th day of the quarantine and neither I, nor my wife nor the kids have shown any symptoms of the virus,” he explained in a telephone interview last Friday May 29.
Alghali, who alleged double standard in the way the EOC enforces its rules, further explained that the tenant whose relative first tested positive had since completed quarantine and had been released, even when the EOC claims his daughter is positive.
“My neighbor and his family who brought the virus have since been released and are going about their business, even though we are in the same compound. If another person has tested positive, we all should continue the quarantine period,” he said.
The EOC’s testing regime has come under scrutiny in recent weeks when calls to retest Kuwaiti deportees were scrapped after the first test found all of them positive, contradicting results of tests earlier conducted in the gulf state.
The EOC spokesman did not respond to our call or text message requesting for comment.
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