South Africa’s first health worker to get COVID jab urges colleagues to get booster shot
South Africa’s first healthcare worker to receive a COVID-19 vaccine shot has added her voice to calls for more people to get vaccinated.
As part of the Sisonke COVID-19 vaccination programme, 43-year-old sister Zoliswa Gidi-Dyosi, who works at Khayelitsha District Hospital, received her first shot together with President Cyril Ramaphosa and then Health Minister Zweli Mkhize in February this year.
More than 230,000 healthcare workers have so far received a Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine booster shot, compared to more than 496,000 who’ve received their first jab during phase 1 of the programme earlier this year.
Sister Zoliswa Gidi-Dyosi, who’s been a nurse at the Khayelitsha District hospital for the past eight years, hopes the COVID-19 pandemic will soon be a thing of the past and that we’ll be able to freely visit family and friends.
“When I’m looking at my kids and I’m looking at my mother, my mother is old and is a pensioner, how I wish that COVID can at least go away,” Gidi-Dyosi said.
Sister Gidi-Dyosi, who received her J&J booster jab earlier this month, said that people should take the vaccine as an extra layer of protection while also practicing other COVID-19 safety measures.
“It’s very important because maybe if I didn’t get this shot I was going to be sick with this virus because I’ve noticed some of my colleagues did not get the vaccine, they got sick and then they were positive when they tested. So me, I was negative,” she said.
Health workers can sit down for their COVID-19 immunization booster, using their “booster dose” voucher at any vaccination site, until the 14th of next month.
-EWN
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