The Variant Hunters: Inside South Africa’s Effort to Stanch Dangerous Mutations
The New York Times
Scientists in a cutting-edge laboratory do part of the work. Local health workers on foot do the rest.
NTUZUMA, South Africa — A few months ago, Sizakele Mathe, a community health worker in this sprawling hillside township on the edge of the city of Durban, was notified by a clinic that a neighbor had stopped picking up her medication. It was a warning sign that she had likely stopped taking the antiretroviral tablet that suppresses her H.I.V. infection.
That was a threat to her own health — and, in the era of Covid-19, it might have posed a risk to everyone else’s. The clinic dispatched Ms. Mathe to climb a hill, wend her way down a narrow path and try to get the woman back on the pills.
Ms. Mathe, as cheerful as she is relentless, is part of a national door-to-door nagging campaign. It’s half of a sophisticated South African effort to stanch the emergence of new variants of the coronavirus, like Omicron, which was identified here and shook the world this past week.
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