“Rwanda, in their first month, went from two cases to a hundred and thirty-four,” Joia Mukherjee, the chief medical officer for Partners in Health, a Boston-based nonprofit organization that works in ten countries, said. “Belgium, which is the same size—twelve million people—and is the former colonizer of Rwanda, grew from two cases to seventy-four hundred.”
Re-read those lines again, because you might have misread it because of your bias. A bias that associates Rwanda with genocide and everything negative, and Belgium with chocolates and all things good!
Rwanda did much better than its old colonizer, Belgium! Hey, the entire sub-Saharan Africa is doing much better.
"If the virus had followed the same trajectory there that it has in the West, most African countries would have seen explosive transmission rates by now." Yet, they do not.
Perhaps sub-Saharan African countries don't have enough tests? After all, they are shitholes, according to the stable genius!
The most obvious question, to people from countries still lacking a true picture of their disease burdens, is whether Africa has enough tests. (The short answer is, often, yes.)
We work with the cliched stereotypes of the 'country' of Africa and, therefore, perhaps do not think about the obvious reason for why those countries might be doing better job of managing the coronavirus:
“One reason why we may be seeing what we are seeing is that the continent of Africa reacted aggressively,” John Nkengasong, the director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told me. “Countries were shutting down and declaring states of emergency when no or single cases were reported. We have evidence to show that that helped a lot.”
If only Belgium had done what Rwanda did:
Rwandan officials responded to their first coronavirus cases by tracing, isolating, and testing “contacts,” people whom confirmed or suspected carriers might have encountered before realizing they were, in fact, covid-19 patients. Five days after the first cases were confirmed, commercial flights were halted, and two days later, the country was locked down, both to limit the spread of the disease and to ease the tedious work of contact tracing. By the end of April, health workers had tested more than twenty thousand people and conducted two random community surveys, a method for guarding against the bias of testing too narrowly, which might artificially deflate case figures. “We did not find any community transmission of covid-19 in Rwanda, which was quite good news for us,” Sabin Nsanzimana, an epidemiologist who heads the Rwanda Biomedical Center, which also houses the national reference laboratory that processes covid-19 tests, said. “So far, we are at the phase of containing the epidemic in Rwanda, which means that we know who has the disease.”
Unlike the tRump administration that threw out the pandemic plan that the Obama administration had developed post-Ebola scare, the African countries did not forget the lessons from the Ebola outbreak:
The East African countries that are, so far, outperforming the global West benefitted from Ebola preparations as well. Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, and Uganda all border the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and were forced to respond to its Ebola outbreak in 2018. Each country already has rapid-response teams, trained contact tracers, logistics routes, and other public-health tools and protocols in place, which they have adapted to respond to the coronavirus. That level of cöordination—indeed, of practice—also makes a difference.
How fantastic!
The irony, of course, is that some of the nations that are most burdened by covid-19 taught their African counterparts how to do that work. The U.S. C.D.C. sent disease-surveillance experts to West Africa to train local health workers during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. When the coronavirus struck, the U.S. neglected those same basic public-health protocols.
Humbled we arrogant Americans should be, and 63 million ought to hide out of shame!
Oh, btw, remember these (and more)?
Ebola has been confirmed in N.Y.C., with officials frantically trying to find all of the people and things he had contact with.Obama's fault
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2014
There is ZERO margin for error on Ebola. Are we confident in Obama when he can’t even make a website for $5 Billion?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2014
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