Member of Parliament for Matabeleland North, Ruth Labode, has said COVID-19 cases are on the rise and the Minister of Health Child Care must declare that people start wearing masks again.
Labode, who is a medical doctor and also chairperson of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Health and Child Care, raised a point of order in the National Assembly on Tuesday, 13 June demanding that wearing masks should be made mandatory to curb new COVID-19 infections. She said, as quoted by The Insider:
On a point of order. I am really sorry I have to say this. I was at Mpilo Hospital yesterday and I noticed in Bulawayo a lot of people were wearing masks and I asked.
They said, “Doctor can you go to Mpilo?” I went to Mpilo and a doctor took me to an isolation centre that was supposed to be for cardiac diseases and it has been converted to isolate children with COVID.
When a child who is 3 years has COVID, how many people have been infected who were looking after that child?
He then said to me even pregnant mothers, because COVID is on the increase. If you do not trigger an alarm now, you will go to elections under lockdown.
The Minister must declare now that start wearing masks because COVID is back. For sure COVID is back and it does not want elections.
The Government recently officially lifted the mandatory wearing of masks and the requirement for tourists to produce COVID-19 vaccination certificates and negative PCR tests at the country’s points of entry.
Through Statutory Instrument 102 of 2023, Vice President and Minister of Health and Child Care Constantino Chiwenga directed the scrapping of the mandatory wearing of masks.
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