Image: Staff Sgt. Sara Keller
‘Inevitable’ that virus will come to Africa says continent’s disease control agency chief
Egypt’s health minister confirmed Africa’s first case of Covid-19, the illness caused by a new coronavirus that emerged in China late last year, on 14 February.
The Egyptian case was a 33-year-old man who did not display symptoms and was being isolated in a treatment centre, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said the following day.
John Nkengasong, Africa CDC’s director, said it was “inevitable” that COVID-19 would reach Africa and that his agency had been working with African countries for weeks to prepare them for the disease.
As of 18 February, 21 African countries had reported people under investigation for COVID-19. All—barring the case in Egypt—had been confirmed negative.
“This detection by Egyptian authorities is evidence of the strategy that Africa CDC and member states have adopted in combating the disease,” Nkengasong said.
A disease modelling study published in The Lancet on 19 February identified Egypt, Algeria and South Africa as the African countries with the highest risk of importing COVID-19, based on their air travel connection with China. These countries all have reasonable capacity to respond to an outbreak, the paper noted.
However, a handful of other African countries with moderate risk of importing the virus—Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Angola, Tanzania, Ghana, and Kenya—have more variable capacity to respond and are highly vulnerable, the paper says.
This is where preparation efforts should focus, the paper adds. “Resources, intensified surveillance, and capacity building should be urgently prioritised in countries with moderate risk that might be ill-prepared to detect imported cases and to limit onward transmission.”
Meanwhile, West Africa is using lessons from its Ebola outbreak to prepare for the new coronavirus, said Stanley Okolo, director general of the West African Health Organization, on 17 February.
He was speaking at a regional health summit in Abuja, Nigeria, where health ministers outlined strategies they had put in place to protect the population of West Africa from the virus. The strategies include strengthening cross-border coordination and collaboration, and enhanced surveillance at entry points, according to Nigeria’s minister of state for health, Olurunnimbe Mamora.
While that meeting was going on, 80 experts from 18 African countries met in Nairobi, Kenya, to be trained on how to improve surveillance at points of entry.
“Africa’s best weapon in supporting its health system is to ensure that its surveillance and disease detection systems are strong enough to identify and track at-risk individuals returning from affected countries through basic but sound approach that is based on scientific evidence,” said Justin Maeda, acting head of Africa CDC’s division of surveillance and disease intelligence, in a statement.