When a passenger arriving from Brussels at Cameroon’s Yaounde Nsimalen International Airport on Saturday was found to have a temperature, health officials said he was whisked to a hospital and diagnosed inside four hours as the country’s fourth case of COVID-19.
The central African country was doing more generalized screening for disease long before China revealed the new virus. Along with other countries on the continent, it hopes that its experience guarding against Ebola and other epidemics would help its health system cope with a pandemic that could quickly overwhelm it.
“We have cases that were not caught by the measures in France and Italy that were caught here,” Cameroonian Ministry of Public Health Disease Control Director Georges Alain Etoundi Mballa said, describing the screening as a “spying network.”
Photo: Reuters
“Epidemics come and go, but we keep on the surveillance,” he added.
The virus has appeared in at least 27 out of 49 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In most of them the recorded cases are still in single figures and have come in from abroad — notably Europe — rather than emerging at home.
The stakes are high — if the disease gets into Africa’s poorest areas, the squalid, cramped conditions could cause it to spread at lightning speed.
By Tuesday, Cameroon had decided to close its land, air and sea borders indefinitely — an unusual step on a continent where the WHO fears porous frontiers mean movements could continue unchecked.
Countries with no registered cases have been taking action.
The Malian government on Tuesday said that it had decided to suspend commercial flights from countries with the virus, while Niger is halting international flights and closing land borders for two weeks from today, Nigerian President Mahamadou Issoufou said in a statement.
Hospitals across Africa are already overburdened with cases of measles, malaria and other deadly infectious diseases, and conflicts have displaced hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed infrastructure.
Self-quarantines at home are not practical in many areas, where families cram into a single room, share a communal tap or latrine, and survive on daily earnings.
“Africa should brace itself for a serious challenge,” Africa Centers for Disease Control (Africa CDC) head John Nkengasong said on Wednesday last week. “I still believe containment is possible, but only with extensive testing.”
In South Sudan, devastated by a five-year civil war, the government has just 24 isolation beds, South Sudanese Ministry of Health Coronavirus Disease Incident Manager Angok Gordon Kuol said.
Public officials have been trying to encourage hand-washing, but many people cannot afford soap and do not have running water, he said.
Ebola killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa between 2013 and 2016, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. It devastated communities, but provided valuable lessons.
Nigeria is scrambling to increase the number of isolation beds, and provide more specialized training and equipment at state hospitals.
“Our health system is not as strong as we’d like it to be,” Nigerian Centre for Disease Control head Chikwe Ihekweazu said. “It is because we are a bit worried about our capacity to deal with a large outbreak that we are focused so intensively on prevention and early detection.”
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