After about six months, West Africa has cautiously reopened its airports for foreign arrivals, so I was able to sail back.
Since Americans are welcome in Europe because of our maximum COVID-19 positivity rate, and for fear that a lost connection will catch me at a sanitary airport number 40, I opted for JFK’s direct DELTA flight to Kokata International Airport in Accra, Ghana.
While queuing at my pharmacy for an accelerated polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, required 72 hours before departure for access (unreasonable and not covered by insurance), reports have emerged from the continent’s media on how Africa had challenged COVID -19 expectations.
The stories expressed an unusual disbelief that, while the pandemic wreaked havoc around the world, with a sudden increase in cases in the United States and Europe, Africa had not been as affected as expected.
Eight months in Africa, which accounts for 17% of the world’s population, recorded only 3. 5% of COVID-19 deaths worldwide. According to the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Africa is the only region where COVID-19 cases are increasing.
Experts are looking for this phenomenon.
They evoke the continent’s comparative youth, with an average age of 19 years. The average age in Europe is 44 years. Others say this would possibly be greater use of outdoor spaces or that Africans might have pre-existing protective immune responses. due to exposure to other pathogens.
The most recent study examines the effect of birth-based Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccination in most African countries to protect against tuberculosis.
This is certainly factors, but let us not let clinical scrutiny deprive other Africans.
Having observed from afar and experienced firsthand, I would choose that African countries’ public aptitude reaction to weak and fragile systems, prepared through past experiences, is simply more effective at restricting transmission.
I would say that the policies that were followed and their acceptance through the network, augmented through shared protocols that were implemented at the regional level and across the continent, made all the difference.
I remind you that this solidarity and collective commitment is absent – in the United States and elsewhere.
“The continent can take credit for taking bold, competitive and courageous steps to block its economies from the start,” Dr. John Nkengasong, director of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Telegraph. when they had only 4 to six cases registered, which in particular slowed the spread of the virus on the continent. It was complicated for some of the world’s poorest countries, with almost 90% of economic activity in the casual sector.
In addition, public fitness measures, adding common handwashing, social estating and masking, were temporarily implemented and won on the network. Member States will involve the virus between March and May.
And Africa has once again shown the old adage that delighting is its master.
West African states, which from 2013 to 2016 fought the world’s worst Ebola outbreak that killed more than 11,000 people, would reactivate these public fitness measures: testing, contact tracing and implementation. quarantine: basic to contain COVID-19.
In addition, the prevalence of Lassa fever, yellow fever, cholera, measles and infectious diseases has taught African nations the importance of deploying resources as soon as the disease appears.
African leaders have also learned from Ebola that infectious diseases do not respect borders and that leaders will have to act collectively, leading the African Union to create CDC Africa in 2017. The African CDC has introduced the Association to Promote COVID-19 Testing and a Continental Shelf for the Procurement of Medical and Laboratory Supplies: the African Medical Supply Platform.
Low outdoor detection rates in South Africa and Egypt continue to hamper the ability to carry out surveillance, but still, there is no evidence that a large number of COVID-19-related deaths have been overlooked in Africa. sure there are no mass death events,’ says Dr. Nkengasong
The results will remain asymmetrical, with asymmetric leadership in 54 countries. However, researchers from Oxford and George Washington University summarize the African mantra as follows: act with a decision, act in combination, and act now.
In West Africa, airport reopening has been coordinated with the West African Health Organization and comes with thermal scans or temperature controls. In addition, all visitors are registered through the fitness government and must pass a COVID-19 PCR check within 72 hours of their arrival, as I did.
Some countries, such as Ghana and Togo, have taken the next step in requiring the traveler to undergo immediate diagnostic control (TDR) upon arrival.
I admit I was a little nervous when I landed in Accra; I had heard of false positives in those antigen-based checks, and a foreign guest was transported by ambulance only for negative control 24 hours later, but I went through the medical examination in 20 minutes and learned ever since that a PCR device had been brought to the site for further verification.
But this was just my first hurdle, as I would Liberia, which requires another PCR test, within 72 hours of departure.
In the U. S. , it took the combined effort of my number one care physician and I to locate tests with effects within 3 days, and I feared another search for coronavirus tests, this time without my doctor, but it turns out there’s nothing to worry about.
Sixteen public and personal establishments had been accredited in Accra to verify COVID-19 and I was able to get an appointment at Nyaho Medical Center, with guaranteed effects in 24 hours, less than the portion of the value I paid in Northern Virginia. swab, poured water into his eye and arrived with a signed certificate.
The ethics of my traveler’s adventure is that it’s time to recalibrate our traditionally ingrained perceptions of who possesses wisdom and who has the experience.
We can simply take a page from the Africa Handbook, abandon the autonomous technique and place the force in the collective, as a country and as a global community.
K. Riva Levinson is president and CEO of KRL International LLC, a Washington-based consulting firm operating in emerging markets around the world, winner of the “Choosing the Hero: My Improbable Journey and the Rise of Africa’s First Woman President” award (Kiwai Media, June 2016) Can you stay with her ? rivalevinson
Look at the thread.
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