PATRICK ONEN: I think we need an urgent lockdown before people start dropping dead on the streets 

I spent the afternoon yesterday working on a story about the lack of oxygen in hospitals.

When I visited one of the facilities that has offered to provide free oxygen to hospitals, the painstaking process of refilling the cylinders left me with a lump in my throat.

Each hour, the plant can only refill 24 cylinders…there were trucks from different hospitals queuing up to pick their cylinders…some people I talked to said they had been waiting for over four hours, some even more. Imagine a hospital running out of oxygen and they go and join the queue, how many lives will be lost in that period alone?

I think the authorities are playing down the graveness of this current wave of the pandemic and as such, endangering the lives of countless people who could have been saved.

No body knows conclusively how this virus spreads or how best people can protect themselves. I still think social distance is a fallacy and we as humans who actively use our hands can easily forget (even the most careful) and touch our mouths, nose or eyes (body parts that WHO says are avenue through which the COVID virus get in our bodies) with contaminated hands.

So allowing Ugandans to continue with their lives “normally” is allowing the virus to freely spread, which as we are seeing now, will be detrimental to the country.

The immediate solution, in my opinion, should be the government to LOCKDOWN the country to curb the rapid spread and try to deal with the numbers in hospitals.