Boy stands in front of graffiti promoting fight against coronavirus (Reuters)
Nairobi:
When the new coronavirus hit Tanzania in mid-April, President John Magufuli called for three days of national prayer to seek God’s protection from the plague. Barely a month later, he claimed victory over the disease and invited tourists to return to his East African country.
His rush to reopen came despite the alarm from the World Health Organization (WHO) regarding an almost total lack of information on the spread of the virus in the country of 55 million people, which has one of the weakest health systems in the region.
The scarcity of reliable data plagues many African countries, with some governments reluctant to acknowledge epidemics or expose their crumbling health systems to external scrutiny. Other countries simply cannot do important tests because they are so ravaged by poverty and conflict.
Information sharing is essential to fighting the pandemic in Africa – both to plan the response and to mobilize donor funding – say public health experts. As things stand, it is impossible to assess the total severity of the contagion across the continent.
According to the latest data collected by Reuters, Africa, with a population of 1.3 billion, has registered more than 493,000 confirmed cases and 11,600 deaths. In comparison, Latin America, with about half the population, has registered 2.9 million cases and 129,900 deaths.
Official figures give the impression that the disease has bypassed much of Africa, but the real situation is certainly worse, the WHO special envoy Samba Sow warned on 25 May of a possible “silent epidemic” if screening was not prioritized.
As of July 7, 4,200 tests per million people had been done across the continent, according to a Reuters analysis of figures from the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an organization created by the African Union in 2017. with averages of 7,650 in Asia and 74,255 in Europe.
Interviews with dozens of health workers, diplomats, and local officials revealed not only the scarcity of reliable tests in most countries, but also the efforts that some governments have made to prevent news from emerging. infection rate, even if it meant they had missed donor funding. .
“We cannot help a country against its own free will,” Michel Yao, chief of emergency operations for WHO in Africa, told Reuters. “In some countries, they have meetings and don’t invite us. We are supposed to be the main technical advisor.” Yao refused to distinguish countries, saying that WHO should maintain a working relationship with governments.
For more details, see this graphic: https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/AFRICADATA/dgkplxkmlpb/
PROBLEM IN TANZANIA
Tanzania confirmed its first case of COVID-19 on March 16. The following day, the government convened a task force to coordinate the response with international partners, including WHO, foreign embassies, donors and aid agencies, several sources said.
The organization has never met strangers again, two foreign officials familiar with the situation told Reuters, while government officials did not attend dozens of subsequent coronavirus meetings, they said.
“It is very clear that the government does not want any information on the state of COVID in the country,” said an aid official, who, like many of those interviewed by Reuters for this story, asked not to be identified for fear of upsetting political leaders.
Tanzanian Minister of Health Ummy Mwalimu and the government spokesperson did not respond to telephone calls or email questions raised by this article about their handling of the crisis. Spokesman Hassan Abbasi previously denied hiding information about the country’s epidemic.
Tanzania has not released national figures since May 8, when it recorded 509 cases and 21 deaths. A few days earlier, President Magufuli had rejected the test kits imported from abroad as being defective, claiming on national television that they had also returned positive results on samples taken from a goat and a papaya fruit.
According to three emails seen by Reuters sent between May 8 and May 13, WHO believed it had reached an agreement with the government to let it participate in joint surveillance missions across the country. However, a WHO spokesperson said that all of this was canceled on the day they were due to start, for no reason.
Donors have released some $ 40 million to finance the coronavirus response in Tanzania, two diplomatic sources involved said. But the country’s lack of commitment meant it had missed “tens of millions more,” said another official.
In mid-May, the government decided to ease its lockdown, despite doctors and diplomats saying the epidemic was far from contained. The US Embassy warned its citizens on May 13 that hospitals in the main city of Dar es Salaam were “overwhelmed,” a claim denied at the time by the Tanzanian government.
Tanzania’s inability to share information about its epidemic has frustrated its neighbors, who fear that the gains from painful closures in their own country will be jeopardized when Tanzanians cross porous borders.
WHO held an appeal on April 23 with African health ministers to discuss, among other things, a lack of information sharing, said Yao. He declined to say who was on the call, and Tanzania did not respond to requests for comment regarding his minister’s participation.
The United Nations agency cannot force cooperation and must exercise caution. When WHO officials expressed concern in late April over the lack of measures to contain the virus in Burundi, the tiny country in East Africa expelled its highest representative and three other experts from the WHO without explanation on May 12.
Burundi was one of the first African countries to close its borders in March, which initially seemed to slow the spread of the virus. But the country has seen an increase in suspected cases after rallies ahead of the May 20 general election, a health care provider said on condition of anonymity.
55-year-old Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza died in early June when he was believed to have fallen with COVID-19. The government said in a statement that it had suffered a heart attack. An air ambulance service told Reuters that he took his wife Denise Bucumi to Kenya on May 21, but declined to confirm reports in Kenyan media that she had requested treatment for the coronavirus. A family spokesperson declined to comment.
Burundi’s new president, Evariste Ndayishimiye, has promised measures to fight the pandemic, including mass testing of people suspected of being epicenters of the virus.
Another African state to fall out with WHO was Equatorial Guinea. He has not released figures to the UN agency since late May when his government accused the WHO of inflating the workload and asked it to call back its representative. WHO accused a “misunderstanding of the data” and denied any falsification of the figures.
Mitoha Ondo’o Ayekaba, Deputy Minister of Health of Equatorial Guinea, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the dispute. The Central African country continued to provide periodic updates to the CDC Africa, bringing the number of confirmed cases to 3,071 with 51 deaths.
SURVEILLANCE GAPS
While some countries do not share information, others cannot: their health systems are too weak to perform large-scale testing, surveillance or contact tracing.
“Even in the best of cases, collecting quality data in countries is not easy because people are thin,” said JohnNkengasong, director of CDC Africa. “Combine that with an emergency, and it becomes very, very difficult.”
For example, Islamist militants and ethnic militias operate over large areas of Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali, preventing governments in that country from painting a national picture of the spread of the disease.
As in other countries, a shortage of kits has led Burkina Faso to greatly limit the number of tests it performs on contacts with confirmed cases and people arriving from abroad. This means there is little data on local transmission, according to reports from the Ministry of Health.
Some countries, like Cameroon and Nigeria, have decentralized tests, but many others have very little capacity outside their capitals, said Franck Ale, an epidemiologist with the international aid group Doctors Without Borders (Doctors Without Borders borders).
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a nation of 85 million people already fighting Ebola, was quick to suspend international flights and lock down parts of the capital Kinshasa when the virus struck in mid-March.
However, it has taken three months for the government to be able to test outside Kinshasa, said Steve Ahuka, member of the COVID-19 response committee in Congo, citing a lack of laboratories, equipment and staff. In many areas, it still takes two weeks to get results, said two doctors.
South Africa, the continent’s most advanced economy, is one of the few to have deployed mass testing. But there was a backlog of more than 63,000 untreated samples as of June 10, as global suppliers were unable to meet its demand for laboratory kits, according to the Ministry of Health. The national laboratory service of South Africa has refused to disclose the current backlog.
In the absence of comprehensive test data in other parts of the world, researchers are turning to different criteria to judge the prevalence of coronavirus, including examining the number of deaths that exceed the average for the time of year .
But even this is not possible in most African countries because data from previous years are lacking. Only eight countries – Algeria, Cape Verde, Djibouti, Egypt, Mauritius, Namibia, Seychelles and South Africa – record more than 75% of their deaths, according to the United Nations. Ethiopia records less than 2%, said the country’s health ministry.
Without information on the severity of an epidemic and the resources available to respond to it, countries risk lifting blockages too soon or maintaining them too long, said Amanda McClelland of the US initiative Resolve to Save Lives, Resolve to Save Lives.
“The big gap for us is really to understand the severity of the epidemic,” she said. “Without clarity on the data, it is very difficult to justify the economic pain caused by the closure of downcountries.”
(Additional reporting by Paul Carsten and Camillus Eboh in Abuja, Hereward Holland in Calstock, England, Ryan McNeill in London, Giulia Paravicini in Addis Ababa and Alexander Winning in Johannesburg; Editing by Alexandra Zavis and Crispian Balmer)
(This story has not been edited by GalacticGaming staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
