Remarks by WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti
Good morning and good afternoon to all our journalist colleagues and thank you for joining us for this press conference.
I am very pleased to be joined by colleagues – from the University of Edinburgh, Professor Mutapi and Professor Woolhouse and also by Dr Sam Okuonzi, who is an infectious disease epidemiologist and on the Hospital Management Board at Arua Regional Referral Hospital in Uganda – essentially to consider in this conversation the COVID-19 numbers and the response in Africa and what this tell us.
Interpreting the situation in the Region is quite complex, and requires a combination of metrics and tools, which I’m sure our panellists will elaborate on in our discussions today.
Now cumulatively we have had more than 1.4 million COVID-19 cases reported on the African continent and unfortunately 34,000 people have died.
What we have seen is that even before the first cases were reported in Africa, in February and that was in Egypt, at WHO we were working with governments and partners to ramp-up preparedness and response capacities for COVID-19. Almost all countries established testing within a few weeks, and this was after only two countries at the beginning. There has been a lot of training of health-care workers in surveillance, infection prevention and control, and case management, with support from ourselves in WHO and from other partners.
I have to say in WHO we invested a lot of our technical resources. We have 900 staff members in the African Region that have been repurposed mostly from our country offices and also from the Regional Office, and from senior management. I have to confess I have hardly done anything else except work on COVID-19 since March.
We have provided advisory and material support, helped countries with the procurement of personal protective equipment, test kits, and other essential supplies, and we have been able to mobilize more than US$ 320 million from our international partners for the response in Africa, and also worked with the Africa CDC and others to support governments.
One thing that made a big difference we believe is that from March, so quite early on in the evolution of the pandemic on the continent, Governments quickly implemented restrictions on movement and gathering, the so-called lockdowns, and this we think created a window of opportunity to keep case numbers low and also to strengthen public health capacities.
After starting to ease restrictions in May and June, in an effort and really an imperative to protect livelihoods and economies, countries have started to re-open and some countries, like South Africa, Algeria, Mauritania, Ghana, experienced an increase in COVID-19 cases, and now we are seeing in most countries in the Region a decrease in cases.
Some studies are underway to test if communities have antibodies, really to answer the question “are we missing very many people who were infected, but not detected?”. Some early results suggest a higher number of infections than those that are reported, in countries like Kenya, Malawi and Zambia. To extrapolate these findings to the national level, we think that further research is needed, going beyond urban areas including in rural areas where transmission seems to be lower.
Our preliminary analysis suggests that over 80% of cases in African countries are asymptomatic. This is a bit higher than the asymptomatic rates that are being quoted around the world and this is reinforced by the fact that we have not seen health facilities and health systems overwhelmed by very large numbers of cases.
We are also not seeing evidence of excess mortality due to COVID-19 or missing deaths. We believe that even though we acknowledge that death registration in most of our countries is a problem, we have seen in previous outbreaks, like the West Africa Ebola outbreak, that when communities start to see many numbers of people dying of a particular pattern of illness, they report this at some point or other in the health system.
Overall, to conclude, we would like to recognize that governments took early, quite drastic, action through the lockdowns at great cost to their economies clearly and this has brought us some time.
We are now at the point of relaxing these restrictions which really demands then, two things: that the public health capacities should be up to speed all over countries, to be able to identify cases, to test and isolate them, and to find their contacts and isolate those; and also that all of us, people should know and understand what we should do, meaning to avoid mass gatherings, keep a physical distance, wear masks whenever it is important, especially when we are indoors but also in public places, frequently wash our hands, and very importantly shield older people and those people who have underlying conditions that are risk factors.
So, I look forward very much to discussing with our panellists, what we think is going on in the Region and most importantly what needs to go on into the future so that we help our countries bring an end to transmission of this virus.
Thank you very much.