Hello, I'm Nula McGoveran on the BBC World Service and this is BBC OS, Conversations on Coronavirus,

Pandemic PTSD.

We're spending today sharing the effects of the pandemic on hospital workers in the Dominican

Republic, the US and South Africa and the impact on mental health, including PTSD, post-traumatic

stress disorder. I felt I had to leave or I was going to die. Sadly, there are many people that

are in this situation and that's an emergency not just for us as health workers but for the world.

I wonder how many of us expected that we'd be approaching the second year of the pandemic

with almost as much uncertainty as the first. We have the presence of life-saving vaccines,

albeit global distribution remains an issue. Yet despite this fresh uncertainty resurfaced,

when South Africa became the first country to report on a new COVID-19 variant, Omicron.

The variant has since been found in more than 55 other nations, although in percentage terms,

cases around the world are very small when compared to the Delta variant. We're still waiting

to learn more about the impact of Omicron. The one thing we are being told is that in South Africa,

it's driving a sharp increase in infections. So we brought together two doctors in the country

to share their experiences. They are Dr. Lovio Chona in a district hospital in Odie, Pretoria.

Also, Dr. Kavita Mackan and she is the clinical head of the COVID Response Unit at the Chris

Hane Bariguanath Hospital that's in Soweto in Johannesburg and it's the largest hospital

in the southern hemisphere. We have about 3000 beds at present. At the moment we're within the

fourth wave and definitely we've seen uptick in our number of admissions over the past two weeks.

A lot of milder cases, a lot of the patients are incidental COVID so to speak, so they're

coming to hospital for other reasons and you know through our universal testing strategy they end

up being COVID positive. We were kind of smaller scale, more resource constraints as well. So we

...