Former South African radio presenter, Rob Vember, says question marks still remain after the death of his father who passed away last week Friday.
Vember, who is a former KFM DJ and now lives in the United States, was repatriated back to South Africa at the beginning of this week and broke the tragic news of his father’s passing to his Twitter followers on Wednesday.
In an interview with CapeTalk’s John Maytham, Vember said as a family they are still trying to piece together what happened after his father was admitted to hospital two weeks before his death for surgery to fix a trapped nerve.
“He was what would be deemed the perfect victim for COVID-19; 71-years-old with comorbidities, diabetic, hypertensive and he was overweight,” Vember said.
He said that his father was given a Covid-19 test upon admission to the hospital and later began showing symptoms of the virus. “Shortness of breath, fatigue, cough; all the alarm bells started going off,”
He told Maytham doctors later told the family his father had bronchitis as the second COVID test came back negative.
“Throughout all of this he was in a general ward, not in ICU in any stage…eventually he was moved into high care on Thursday,” Vember said.
“At 6pm last Friday evening we were told everything was fine, he was doing ok, he was stable, at 6:15pm he supposedly had a heart attack and by 7pm he was pronounced dead,” Vember said.
“He was in a non-COVID ward and treated as a non-COVID patient. Blood was drawn post-mortem and we weren’t asked as a family… his blood work came back saying he was positive, its all a bit confusing”
“So we’re really unclear at this point. Did someone mess up and COVID is a convenient excuse?”
Vember says the family is now trying to ‘connect the dots’ and while they want to avoid conspiracy theories, he says something just doesn’t add up.
He says speaking to the undertaker in charge of his father’s remains was particularly alarming, according to him the undertaker said, “He has two bodies, he knows one died in a motorcycle accident and the other of an epileptic fit, yet both their death certificates say COVID-19.”
