Cape Town - During the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Western Cape provincial child health services experienced setbacks as routine child health services were cut back to cope with large numbers of adult infections and admissions.
This emerged during a UCT Children’s Institute briefing to the legislature’s ad hoc Covi-19 committee on the impact the pandemic had on children in the province.
The committee heard that as health services prepared for the first wave, children’s needs were sidelined and resources were diverted from paediatrics to adult Covid-19 care.
This exposed children to the real risk of death from non-Covid-19-related and preventable causes.
The committee was told that while some of the services had been restored, others may take years to recover.
Freedom Front Plus MPL Peter Marais said the fact that child health had not been a priority had depressed and shocked him.
“I want to ask: are we playing God here when we close children’s facilities and give the beds to adults?”
District Paediatrician for Cape Town Metro East Dr Thandi Wessels said: “Some of the problems we’ve had are that with every wave, unfortunately, as soon as the numbers increased we had to cut back on our children’s services.”
She said this was because they had the same pool of staff doing everything. She proposed that during any forthcoming waves no service should be cut.
“What inevitably happens is, and it’s a difficult situation, when you are faced with a person who is dying, that’s who you will try and save. We as a child health group have been advocating that we need to ring fence services for child health.”
Committee member Rachel Windvogel (ANC) wanted to know how many children had died since the start of the pandemic and how many of these had underlying health issues, while EFF MPL Melikhaya Xego asked about the direct impact the pandemic had on child health.
During the presentation it was shown that since the start of the pandemic there had been more than 658 000 cases of Covid-19 in the province, and 46 455 of these were children under 18. There were 3 924 children admitted to hospital and 123 children died.
Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital’s ambulatory and emergency services head Professor Heloise Buys said they suspected that many of the children who died had serious chronic underlying health problems such as heart disease, chronic lung disease, immune deficiencies, cancer, cerebral palsy and other infections that could have caused death.
“It has never been very clear to us whether they died of or with Covid-19.
“We are currently awaiting a full report so that we can inform everybody about why these children died and what the underlying conditions they may have had were.”
mwangi.githahu@inl.co.za