Remarks by WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti
I’d like to wish a very good morning to our journalist colleagues and thank you for having joined us for this press conference this morning.
Thank you also to our colleagues at the UN palais for organizing this together with our team.
So, the situation, in fact, is that on the African continent, there are now more than 200,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and sadly 5000 people have lost their lives. We know that it took 98 days to reach the first 100,000 cases and only 19 days to move to 200,000 cases. So even though these cases in Africa account for less than 3% of the global total, it is clear the pandemic is accelerating.
It is important to note that the epidemic on the continent is heterogeneous – it is very varied from one country to another. Ten of the 54 countries in Africa are currently driving the numbers, and they account for 75% of the total cases. Five countries account for 71% of the total deaths.
The majority of countries still have fewer than 1000 reported cases, that is in the African Region, just over half of the countries.
There is community transmission in more than 50% of countries however and this is a nefarious sign that requires a lot of effort on everybody’s part. In many cases the pandemic is concentrated in and around capital cities, but we are seeing more and more cases spread out into the provinces, into the hinterland in countries.
In South Africa for example, the most affected country on the continent, accounting for over a quarter of the total cases – there are high daily cases and deaths reported in two provinces, in the Western Cape and also in the Eastern Cape.
Specifically, in the Western Cape, where we are seeing a majority of cases and deaths, the trend seems to be similar to what was happening in Europe and in the USA. The majority of deaths, of course all over the Region, are among people over 60 years old, who have co-morbidities, existing conditions like diabetes, hypertension and obesity.
Then turning to the response:
This pandemic arrived in Africa in February – later than in other parts of the world, and so countries did have some time to prepare.
In fact, they were building on experiences of responding to severe and widespread outbreaks, for example, Ebola – we are just coming to the end of one Ebola outbreak in the DRC – cholera, measles and other diseases. Governments took action quickly, and we recognize here the leadership of African Heads of State. Most countries have established high-level inter-ministerial taskforces and also national incident management systems to coordinate the operations of the response.
Countries, with the support of WHO and other partners, including the Africa CDC, also quickly started to scale-up their health workforce, meaning training was carried out, including remotely, and laboratory capacities, and to set-up points-of-entry screening at airports and border crossings. And I may say here, that the airport point-of-entry screening had already been put in place in preparedness for the Ebola outbreak that’s been going on in the DRC.
Many governments made very difficult decisions, with limited information and the risk that waiting for the information to become available, would run the risk of COVID-19 spreading undetected in communities.
So social measures to facilitate physical distancing – such as so-called lockdowns, asking people to stay at home, work places to close, stopping church services and so forth – were put in place. And countries used the window of opportunity created by these measures, to expand public health capacities to find, test, isolate and care for cases, and to trace and also isolate their contacts.
These public health and social measures have been effective in slowing the spread of COVID-19 in Africa we believe. However, stay-at-home orders and closing of markets and businesses, have taken a heavy economic toll, particularly on the most vulnerable and marginalized communities, and we know that many African people work in the informal sector of the economy.
With the Africa CDC and Resolve, we surveyed more than 20,000 Africans across 28 cities on their perceptions of the pandemic, and the majority said that if asked to stay at home, they would run out of food and money in less than 12 days. Low-income households would run out in less than a week.
So, the need to balance between saving lives and protecting livelihoods is a key consideration in this response, and particularly so in Africa.
One of the biggest challenges we face in the response, continues to be the availability of supplies, particularly test kits, and this is due to disruptions in the global supply chain.
The UN has established a Supply Chain Taskforce and other mechanisms are in place to address these shortages, including work done by the African Union, and more than eight million diagnostic supplies and 200 million items of personal protective equipment, are in the pipeline to be shipped to African countries.
There has been a lot of discussion on whether cases are being missed due to a lack of testing and it is possible that some asymptomatic and mild cases are being missed. However, having worked with countries for many years in strengthening integrated disease surveillance, as well as influenza sentinel sites in 28 countries, and community-based surveillance, we believe that large numbers of severe cases and deaths are not being missed in Africa.
Another key challenge, is making sure that essential health services continue to be provided, while attention is focused on the pandemic. We have seen in the past, in Ebola outbreaks for example, more people dying of measles and malaria than of Ebola itself.
In some countries, there was also a spike in maternal deaths due to pregnant women being afraid they would get infected if they went to health facilities to seek care. So, it is important that people can continue to safely access care for malaria, for HIV, for children to be immunized and women to safely deliver their babies, among other life-essential services.
This pandemic is truly transforming our societies, and it is also highlighting opportunities to transform health sectors, so that care is delivered in more integrated and people-centred ways, including making greater use of technology to deliver services and refresh health worker skills, doing more home visits and door-to-door approaches, and more structured outreach campaigns to limit mass gatherings of people.
As we implement interventions for COVID-19, we are looking for opportunities to build more resilient health systems and to make sure we look beyond short-term gains and towards achieving Universal Health Coverage.
This work requires the support of many partners, and we are very appreciative of the donors contributing to the response, and to our UN sister agencies leading on socio-economic and humanitarian interventions, as well as our many partners in the private sector, in civil society, and those supporting research and development.
At the heart of all these collective efforts, are the communities that we serve, and I would like to conclude by appreciating the patience, the perseverance and the sacrifice of individual people.
As we learn to live with COVID-19, the actions of individuals will make the most difference in stopping the spread of the virus – frequent hand hygiene, physical distancing, and wearing masks over the mouth and nose when we are out and about in society. These are the key ways to prevent COVID-19 spreading from person-to-person.
I am convinced that by: empowering and enabling communities to take the needed actions; making sure the public health measures are in place in every community, at every phase of the response; ensuring that essential health services continue to function; and accelerating international solidarity in the response – the cases can stay low in number in Africa, thereby saving lives and safeguarding international health security.
So, I would like to thank you once again colleagues, journalists, for joining us today, and for your coverage of this pandemic, which is helping to keep communities informed and also combatting misinformation.
I look forward very much to our interaction.
Thank you.