The relatively few COVID-19 cases in Africa so far has perplexed governments and health care administrators. But now, as the virus pops up across the continent, there’s less looking back and more looking forward with alarm.
Africa is awakening to COVID-19, says Dr. John Nkengasong, director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
“This is our morning. China is seeing the sunset, Europe and other countries maybe the middle of the day”, he says, characterizing the timeline of the deadly virus.
With 1.2 billion people, Africa is reporting more than 250 cases as of Sunday, though there many more may be undetected.
Ethiopia and Kenya announced their first cases only last Friday. Both cases involve people coming or returning to Africa from abroad.
One is a Kenyan woman who had been in the U.S. and had travelled home to Nairobi via London. In Ethiopia, the first was a Japanese traveller. That’s been the pattern so far — the virus imported. But health authorities are bracing themselves for transmission in the community.
“We know that there is no country in the world that has reported a case and that case has not expanded to other cases,” Nkengasong says. “So I think that’s where I see this is the morning for Africa and we should be preparing ourselves for a marathon.”
WATCH | Africa’s top public health official explains his outlook on COVID-19
Africa, late to feel the threat of coronavirus, is now bracing for it. The head of Africa’s Centres for Disease Control is preparing for a ‘long haul.’ 2:16
Nkengasong is now at the centre of a growing storm, wrangling more than 40 countries on the continent to ramp up testing and containment, with few health resources and growing economic pressures.
A widely respected virologist, his career specialty has been HIV aids, but appointed to lead the new African CDC three years ago, he battled through the Ebola crisis, which has now killed over 13,000 people.
Some west African countries are more familiar with epidemics, their transmission and containment as a result of Ebola, but the ‘lessons learned’, have been more on paper than in practice, he says.
“We documented what should have been done. But did we implement what we found out that should be done, the answer is no, we didn’t.”
“We’ve taken health security, w