T he Director of the Limbe Regional Hospital, Dr. Kinge Thompson Njie has urged Cameroonians who are unable to get imported face masks to go in for locally produced ones, so as to help contain the spread of the deadly coronavirus. In an exclusive chat with The SUN Newspaper last April 16, 2020, Dr. Kinge Thompson told The SUN’s Limbe city reporter, SIMON NDIVE KALLA that the local masks are just as efficient as the imported ones, giving directives on how to go about using them.
What is the importance of wearing face masks during this period of coronavirus?
Face masks generally play the role for physical barrier for your mouth and nose, so that anyone who sneezes or coughs around you will not put you at the risk of inhaling the coronavirus or causing it to drop somewhere in your mouth or around your mouth.
What type of face masks do you recommend?
Whether masks are locally made or imported, the main role these masks play is to protect us from inhaling the virus! Now I will say it’s expensive for people to be buying masks, am talking about imported face masks because the imported face masks which are made up of some paper tissues should be normally used for 24 hours, in fact 3-4 hours daily.
This means that, in a day you may be required to use three or four masks. People don’t have that kind of money; so we are encouraging people to have locally made masks. There are a lot of seamstresses and tailors around who can make these masks; they are efficient as imported face masks. So far as their role of physical barrier is concern, they can produce the same results.
So it’s an advantage to have locally made face masks because if you have two, you can use one throughout the day, wash it in bleach, iron it, while you’re using the other one and by the next day you’re using the previous one, while you wash the other.
You can say that if you have to deal with locally made face masks in the period of two weeks it will be very much cheaper for all of us to be using locally made masks.
This is not a campaign for locally made masks, but I’m saying that people do not have that money to be changing masks on a daily bases. Let us do with locally made masks because they are as efficient as imported ones.
Some people fear that imported masks are contaminated. What’s your take?
There’s this fear that imported masks are contaminated by the virus; we should not go in for rumours, this is a time when information has to be well treated and precised…so let’s be very careful and refer ourselves to what the World Health Organisation, WHO is saying. If WHO is far from us, let’s listen and believe what the Ministry of Public Health is saying!
What do you make of the current figure of COVID-19 in Cameroon?
Personally I’m not surprised; I was expecting this although it has come earlier than projected.
When we were at 200 identified cases, I foresaw that by the end of April we may be getting to 1000, we are only at mid April, but the number has increased exponentially.
This should cause all of us to be more careful, cautious and be afraid of the unknown and because, I know all of us are afraid to die, this should reawaken us to prevent the virus by following the instructions the World Health Organisation, WHO and the Minister of Public Health