Some African countries will have more than 10,000 COVID-19 cases by the end of this month, health officials said on Thursday, as the continent least equipped to treat serious infections has an “enormous gap” in the number of ventilators and other critical items.
While cases across Africa rose above 6,000 at what has been called the dawn of the outbreak, the continent is “very, very close” to where Europe was after a 40-day period, Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director John Nkengasong told reporters.
The virus “is an existential threat to our continent,” Nkengasong said.
Photo: AFP
All but four of Africa’s 54 countries have cases after Malawi on Thursday reported its first and local transmission has begun in many places.
Nkengasong said that authorities are “aggressively” looking into procuring equipment such as ventilators that most African countries desperately need, and local manufacturing and repurposing are being explored.
“We’ve seen a lot of goodwill expressed to supporting Africa from bilateral and multilateral partners,” but “we still have to see that translate into concrete action,” he said.
The WHO does not know how many ventilators are available across Africa to help those in respiratory distress, regional WHO director Matshidiso Moeti told reporters.
“We are trying to find out this information from country-based colleagues... What we can say without a doubt is there is an enormous gap,” Moeti said.
Some countries have only a few ventilators. Central African Republic has just three.
A small percentage of people who are infected will need ventilators and about 15 percent need intensive care, WHO official Zabulon Yoti said.
The health officials pleaded for global solidarity at a time when even some of the world’s richest countries are scrambling for basic medical needs, including masks.
“Countries like Cameroon just reached out yesterday, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, asking: ‘Look, we need tents because we’re running out of hospital beds already,’” Nkengasong said.
Even if equipment is obtained, getting them to countries is a growing challenge with Africa’s widespread travel restrictions, although countries have made exceptions for cargo or emergency humanitarian flights.
Simply gauging the number of cases in Africa is a challenge, even in South Africa, the most developed country on the continent, where authorities have acknowledged a testing backlog.
Other countries are affected by the widespread shortage of testing kits or swabs, although 43 countries in the WHO Africa sub-Saharan region now have testing capability, up from two in early February.
As more African countries impose lockdowns, the WHO and the African CDC expressed concern for the millions of low-income people who need to go out daily to earn their living.
That’s a “huge challenge,” Moeti said, adding that hundreds of thousands of children are now out of school as well.
It is too soon to tell how the lockdown in places like South Africa has affected the number of cases, she said.
The lockdowns are causing unease.
The first sub-Saharan African nation to impose a lockdown, Rwanda, has now extended it by two weeks, a sign of what might be to come for other nations. Botswana imposed its own, effective yesterday.
“Don’t lock down the whole country,” Nkengasong said. “Lock down cities or communities where there’s extensive community transmission so ... social harm is minimized, but if infection is spreading across the entire country, you have no choice.”
Health experts in Africa are rushing to understand whether factors such as Africa’s youthful population — about 70 percent of the continent’s people are under age 30 — will be a benefit in fighting off the virus and how the widespread problems of malnutrition, HIV, tuberculosis and malaria might affect people’s ability to fight off infection.
“Our greatest fear” is that programs tackling those perennial issues will be sapped by the current crisis, Nkengasong said. “The time to advocate for those programs is not when COVID is over. The time is now.”
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