‘Keep fit’ mania stopped

KALOBWE BWALYA writes LUSAKA Province Minister Bowman Lusambo yesterday disrupted crowds of people engaged in routine physical fitness. The Minister ordered scores of residents to go back home as they were not following Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) preventive guidelines such as maintaining social distance and wearing face masks. Mr Lusambo, moved around most parts of the city where physical fitness activities had been taking place such as jogging and other exercises. He was incensed by multitudes of people who were not observing the guidelines. Speaking after dispersing a crowd near the flyover bride next to Findeco House, Mr Lusambo expressed disappointment at the lack of responsibility over the fight against COVID-19. The crowd mostly comprised of boys and girls from Kanyama, Misisi, and Kuomboka townships. Mr Lusambo said it would be very difficult to contain the disease especially that Lusaka was the epicentre of the pandemic. “I am very disappointed because most of the people who were here are children, young boys and girls in the age between 10 to 15 years and for me, we need more effort. We need to up our game because like this, you can’t contain the disease. “What we are discouraging here are people defying the preventive measures such as maintaining social distance which was not observed here. There are measures such as putting on face masks but when we came here, we found people squeezed and without masks,” he said. The Minister said there was need for more vigorous sensitisation campaigns especially in compounds around Lusaka “We need to invest a lot of sensitization in the compounds. There are quite a number of people here. When we came around 04:30, we found hundreds of people from our compounds such as Misisi, Kuomboka, and Kanyama to exercise at the flyover bridge. “Exercising is not the problem. The problem is that we have COVID-19 with Lusaka being the epicentre. We don’t know how many households are represented here and we don’t know how we can control COVID -19 with a situation we found here,” he said. The Sun