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Cameroon Doctors Ask for Protection as Attacks by COVID Carriers Increase

Moki Edwin Kindzeka

   YAOUNDE - Medical staff in Cameroon are asking for additional security
   at hospitals following a series of attacks by people upset that they or
   their loved ones were diagnosed with the coronavirus. Cameroon so far
   has 3,300 confirmed cases of the virus with 147 deaths.

   Gervais Gabriel Atedjoe, secretary general of Cameroon's National
   Medical Council, said attacks on hospitals, especially health care
   workers, are increasing by the day.

   Speaking by phone from the coastal city of Douala, Atedjoe said health
   workers are being attacked by people who either contest tests showing
   them positive for COVID-19, or reject medical reports that their
   relatives died of coronavirus.

   He said the National Medical Council of Cameroon is scandalized and
   wants to state categorically that it is totally inadmissable to attack
   medical staff members who are simply carrying out their duties of
   saving lives. He said they are asking the government to increase
   protection at hospitals and to educate civilians to desist from
   attacking health workers because within the past three weeks, medical
   doctors, nurses and laboratory technicians have been attacked on a
   daily basis.

   The Medical Council reports attacks in seven hospitals since Thursday.
   Six workers sustained injuries and are being treated, and eight others
   sustained minor injuries.

   In the most extreme attacks, doctors said that last week, angry crowds
   exhumed at least four corpses of people buried after they died of
   COVID-19 in the cities of Douala and Bafoussam to stop the spread of
   the killer virus.

   The exhumers said they wanted to give the bodies a proper burial.

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