WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti
Good afternoon and thank you to all the journalists who are joining us here.
I’d like to say a special word of welcome to our colleagues from the IFRC and from the World Economic Forum. Thank you so much for having agreed to be with us today.
We have understood, and I’m very glad that in our discussion today with these colleagues, we will be able to understand better, what is going to be the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa, not only on the health of the people but also on the socio-economic lives of the people, at the community level, in families, which is something that we are very concerned about and we need to agree together and support the governments on how to mitigate these various impacts.
So, what is the situation currently in Africa now. We have now had reported over 17 000 cases and we know that around 900 people have lost their lives due to COVID-19.
We are concerned that the virus continues to spread geographically within countries and the numbers continue to increase every day. We have countries like South Africa, Algeria and Cameroon, which now account for around half of the confirmed cases. So, the spread continues particularly in Algeria and Cameroon.
We also have a number of countries like Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Algeria, where the case fatality rate is rather high, so we would like to help those countries find out what is happening in terms of case management (caring for people) so that the quality of care can be improved and the numbers and proportion of those who are dying can be decreased.
A number of African countries in the last week have seen a rather rapid increase in their case numbers. This is countries like Niger, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon. This is a reminder of the importance of continuing to implement the public health measures that we have now defined several times, over and over again. Testing people, and we recognize that testing has become a challenge now because of the availability of test kits. Contact tracing and ensuring effective quarantining of those who are infected – both the cases and those who are potentially infected, the contacts. This is absolutely important.
We know that countries are putting in place measures for physical distancing and have observed that in some of our contexts in African countries this is very difficult to enforce where people are living, as we have said before, in very crowded conditions.
I would really like to emphasize the implementation of these measures for public health and to also say we need to continue to strive to engage people at the grassroots level so that they understand what is the risk and they are able to figure out how they can best protect themselves and their families and the society at large based on the limitations and the challenges that they face in their families and their communities.
I am very pleased, in relation to the challenges of testing, to say that we have started to work with the World Food Programme, the Government of Ethiopia and the African Union to distribute some supplies, including personal protective equipment for health-care workers and some test kits, which are a combination of what WHO has procured at the global level and also another donation from the Jack Ma Foundation. So, we are very appreciative of these contributions.
To conclude, we understand very well that the impact in Africa will be very severe. We still have 14 African countries that have reported fewer than 20 cases and I would like to very much encourage that we seize this opportunity to contain and limit the spread out of the learnings that are occurring every day, from the experiences of countries with more advanced forms of the pandemic.
Thank you very much and I look forward very much to our discussion.