Lessons from Ebola have helped keep COVID-19 cases low in Africa, says top public health official
'We learnt during all the previous outbreaks that starting early is the key to keeping the numbers low'
Despite doomsday-like warnings of COVID-19 outbreaks in Africa, a top official for the continent's public health agency says prevention efforts have kept the numbers of coronavirus cases low in many countries.
"We were watching, quite amused there, at all the numbers that were being shared — how people would be dying in the streets in Africa. But I'm glad that Africa is proving those naysayers wrong," said Dr. Ahmed Ogwell Ouma, deputy director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
"We have put in place, with the little resources that we have, mechanisms that are actually protecting our citizens from getting infected."
Many African countries have been successful in slowing the spread of COVID-19, largely by implementing strict lockdown conditions. In early May, South Africa and Nigeria began loosening coronavirus-related restrictions. According to Johns Hopkins University, the countries have reported approximately 40,000 and 11,000 cases respectively as of Friday.
But in the face of spreading misinformation about the virus, Ouma concedes that the CDC is "not where we would like to be." However, he believes that efforts to curb the spread means that numbers will not be "exploding" in coming months.
Here is part of his conversation with The Current's Matt Galloway.
How would you characterize the spread of this virus across the continent right now?
Right now, the picture is quite mixed. There are certain countries where the spread has been quite rapid from the moment that the first cases were introduced by travellers. And there are parts of the continent where it has been relatively calm.
Overall, we are seeing that for the last three or so weeks, the numbers have been going up much faster. And we, as Africa's CDC and Africa Union, are doing everything we can to support our countries on the continent, to be better prepared and to keep the numbers low.
In the early days of this pandemic, we had conversations on this program with people like Stephen Lewis and others who were very concerned about the possibility that if the virus were to take hold on the continent, that it could be devastating. Why hasn't it spread further and faster until now? What's been done to keep it in check?
These are lessons that we've learnt from other previous outbreaks of other types of diseases. In 2014, 2016, during the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, it was very clear to the Africa Union leadership that the continent needed its own public health agency. And so Africa CDC was set up. So there's a lot of coordination going on, not just within the health sector, but also with other sectors, finance, transport, for example.
Secondly, we learnt during all the previous outbreaks that starting early is the key to keeping the numbers low. As soon as it was recognized that the virus was spreading outside of China, in January, we instituted our incidence management system.
What we have learned as this virus has spread is that you only know what you know, and the way that you find out how widespread the virus is is through testing. And testing, testing, testing, as we hear from the WHO, is going to be the way out of this. How robust is the testing across Africa?
Across Africa, we are not at the level that we want because right now, as of this morning, we have tested roughly 2.4 million, but Africa is a continent of 1.3 billion.
To reach one per cent, we are still quite some way off in terms of testing. But I must emphasize here that whatever testing is being done is giving us an indication of what the picture is in the community.
Secondly, as Africa CDC, we have actually rolled out today a partnership to accelerate COVID-19 testing. We call it PACT, and this is intending to test 10 million Africans over the next 24 weeks.
But just to be clear, you're not concerned that that low number of testing doesn't indicate that perhaps this good news story isn't as good as people might want to believe?
The good news story is a good news story, and we are advocating for increased testing so that we are better prepared having understood the numbers.
But as it stands to be, the testing protocol that countries are following, and our guidance, are effective, and we know they are working and we know that whatever precautions we are seeing in the population is pretty much a good picture.
It may not be totally accurate, but it is a good picture of what to expect.
One of the things that people learned in [the Ebola] fight was around the importance of contact tracing — that if somebody were to be infected, you need to figure out who they've been around and where that could spread through their immediate contacts. What have you learned in that fight about the importance of contact tracing in this pandemic?
Just like during the Ebola time, there is absolutely no replacement for good contact tracing. We are going to need to support countries to help one million community health workers to be distributed across the continent into the rural communities, particularly, and informal settlements in urban centres, so that they can take the message of what COVID-19 is, what you need to do to protect yourself and the availability of testing for those who may be exposed, and what kind of symptoms and signs they need to look out for.
How concerned are you about when a vaccine is developed, if a vaccine is developed, that this rush to get people's hands on the vaccine from all around the world could leave countries in Africa behind?
This is a concern that we raised from the moment that we started looking for a vaccine, that it needs to be an equitable process.
And we have put in place systems that are going to ensure that any vaccine that is being tested in Africa, we have an equitable share when the production at commercial levels begin.
Apart from that, we are actually negotiating with some of the testing institutions so that we can be able to have local production happening within Africa as well.
Written by Jason Vermes. Produced by Alison Masemann.
