The two Durban schoolteachers, Gary and Andy Cronje gave us fascinating insights as they holed up in China, the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic. They managed to fly back to South Africa when schools in China closed and after another period of self-isolation in Johannesburg; they said they were ready to return to China to resume teaching. But tragedy has struck. Gary’s cousin who drove them back from the airport has died from the coronavirus. He was Johan Vorster, a healthy 50 year old. The Cronjes told Alec of the guilt they felt, but also how they knew that Johan who was an ATM  technician could have picked up the disease somewhere else as they both recovered from illness in China. They stressed the importance of testing and tracing. – Linda van Tilburg
We are back from China and we’ve done a full 360 of this Covid-19 virus.
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While we were in China we were unaffected but back home it has hit a personal note.
That’s extraordinary. I received your WhatsApp today about Johan, I believe he is your cousin Gary?
Yes he’s my first cousin, more like a brother to both of us. He’s older than us and the kind of guy that if you ask him to do something he’ll do it with pleasure. When we arrived back from China he came to fetch us at the airport.
We feel devastated and awful as some people blame us. However we have had some medical practitioners and friends – both in Beijing and South Africa – reason that if we were the carriers we would have passed it to my parents who are elderly. So now the question is where did Johan get it?
He did travel around the country quite a bit. He was a senior technician for ATM machines. He had even been sent to Dubai to be trained. So he would be called to fix major problems around the country. He was intelligent and a gentle giant.
ATM machines must be one of the highest risk areas, with so many people pressing those buttons, that’s as bad as handling money.
Yes, after he dropped us from the airport he had to leave to go to Polokwane.
Had we been at lockdown at that stage yet?
No. It was the 9th of March, we had just arrived in South Africa, and Johan met us at the airport, he was a bit early so he had breakfast at one of the cafes while waiting for us. Because we had just climbed off a plane full of people from China we gave him a mask. When we arrived home we put ourselves in quarantine.
And he went off to Polokwane, who knows who he come in contact with. Is there any attempt being made to track the people that he engaged with?
The hospital he was in, phoned us for our details but since then we’ve heard nothing. I have phoned them several times for testing to see if we are carriers. Maybe we were positive but asymptomatic so we don’t want to put someone else at risk, but they said if you don’t show any symptoms we won’t test you. We also called the national hotline as well and they asked us our time line and who we live with.Â
We’ve been home for 25 days. We last saw Johan 20 days ago. He visited us with his wife, Cynthia, we had a small barbecue with my mother and father in law, we were still keeping ourselves to one side. Cynthia is now positive, but only with mild symptoms.
Cynthia’s mother however is a miracle. She lives with Cynthia and Johan. She’s 81 and she tested negative, so we are thankful for that.
When Johan came to visit you 20 days ago, presumably he was healthy?
Yes he was fine but he started feeling a little sick. I think it was more than two weeks ago he went to the doctor. The doctor tested him but the results were delayed, apparently they were lost, then found, but the results were negative. Nonetheless he stayed at home and just got progressively sicker with a very high temperature. His brother took him to the hospital, he went to ICU for a few days, then he improved, he started sitting up, eating and was looking at being discharged. They thought he would come home and that night around 6 o’clock they phoned Cynthia to say he regressed they were going to put him on a ventilator. At 10.20 that night he passed away.
You two have been very close to this Covid-19 from your time in China. The people you know there, is it typical what happened with Johan. In other words his passing?
Yes. Usually the symptoms will show after about 4 days. Then you will start getting temperature or body aches and pains with an irritating cough and then they do tests and that’s where the whole process starts. But by this time the virus has so far spread in your body, you’ve already infected as many people that come in contact with you. The demon in the virus – that they described it to us – before you show symptoms is that it is highly contagious and then only you show symptoms.
So back to the reason to be tested. We phoned the National Call Centre and they said we did not qualify to be tested because we are not showing any symptoms, and my parents-in-law and my step-father, the only people I have been in contact with, are not sick.Â
Its heart wrenching and we feel so guilty. We know we’re not infected. There were hundreds of other people that came into the country on the same day as we did. The government – as you know – announced anybody who came in after the 9th had to present themselves for testing. We had to fill out tons of paperwork to say where we were living. Our contact numbers both from China and in South Africa. So if anybody on our flight was ill or has fallen ill customs would have contacted us by now. So the assumption is because of the stringent health checks, no one on our flight was ill. I just think that it has been irresponsible of the government not to want to test us. If we are carriers and asymptomatic, we could have potentially put a lot of people at risk, but as they said, it’s almost impossible for all three of us to be carriers and my mother and father and not have been affected.
That’s my question. I remember last time we spoke you said that you did get sick?
Yes, we did, in China.
But but surely once you’ve got sick you don’t carry the virus anymore or do you?
We don’t know. From what I’ve read up, once you have recovered, your body does produce some sort of antibody. There have been a few cases of re-infection where they thought they had finished treating it, but they didn’t. That re-infection happens maybe a week or two weeks after the initial illness. So it’s impossible we were sick in early January, it is now April and I doubt that we would have been walking around all this time in perfectly good health.
It would be good to get a test and then you could possibly find out. There is very interesting research coming out now from the New York Institute of Technology, which is a very highly reputable university. They are showing they’ve done analysis of countries where babies get a BCG vaccination, in other words the TB vaccination at birth. South Africa thankfully has been getting this since the 1920s. The United States stopped it. They don’t have it in the USA, Italy or Spain, and these countries have the highest infections. I was just wondering about Johan. Was he born in this country?
Yes. He grew up in Sophiatown with his grandmother, mother and sisters. He had that mark on his arm that we all got from that era, so yes, we believe he had the vaccine.
So that doesn’t really support that theory.
No, furthermore he was a very healthy man apart from being a normal South African man and having a couple of drinks he exercised regularly, didn’t smoke and did kick-boxing. He was the fighter out of all of us. He had just turned 50.
