By A Correspondent- Harare’s Glaudina suburb has recorded another COVID-19 death, ZimEye can exclusively reveal.

The man, who worked at a local sugar refinery company died Friday morning at his home where he was recuperating in self quarantine.

Neighbours had to break the windows of the house where the man was after his wife who is in Bulawayo asked a neighbour to check on her husband whom she said was not picking up her calls since yesterday.

Said the source:

“Everyone was equally afraid to get closer to the corpse because he was a COVID-19 known case. So when the community members broke the windows, no-one got close to the corpse for fear of contracting the virus.”

The source narrated how the community tried in vain to call the publicised COVID 19 toll free numbers.

“We called the numbers that were publicised by the Information minister Monica Mutsvangwa but no one was picking up the call. We tried it for over 2 hours while some of the community members went to report the death at a local police station.”

The source said they went to Dzivarasekwa police station where they noted that the police were not properly equipped to deal with COVID-19 deaths.

“They had a car but no fuel to start with. What was even baffling is that the police officers had no PPEs so most of the police details were reluctant to attend to the corpse.”

The source told this publication that the officer in charge at Dzivarasekwa police station assisted the community members to contact City of Harare’s rapid response team who quickly attended to the dead man.

However, the City of Harare did not fumigate the house where the man died.

Added one Masunda:

“Nothing was done to fumigate the house and they just collected the body and left. We engaged Dr Prosper Chonzi who was very rude to us.

He told us that the City of Harare does not have the capacity to fumigate the house and that there was nothing that they can do. He even said we should stop troubling him as he had received over a 100 calls from concerned residents.

Dr Chonzi’s conduct is not reflective of a public official. He is an arrogant man who should just call it quits becuase he does not have the skills to deal with the public. Rather than giving us the way forward, he was just very rude.”

Efforts to get a comment from Dr Chonzi were futile by the time of writing.