What the World Can Learn From Africa’s Covid-19 Response

What The World Can Learn from Africa’s Covid-19 Response Where America has floundered, many African countries have succeeded Tiffany Onyejiaka Medium

The United States has had a less than successful handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. From the government response to individual protests, the American response has abounded with politics and failures that have led to unfortunately high fatalities.

While the U.S. has floundered, other countries have succeeded. Many have praised the response from countries like New Zealand and Singapore, but other countries, particularly in Africa, have done well, too.

For example, Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, has over 200 million people and confirmed more than 66,000 Covid-19 cases and 1,160 fatalities as of November 2020. The United States, on the other hand, has 330 million people and confirmed more than 12.5 million Covid-19 cases and 260,000 deaths as of November 2020.

Africa’s Covid-19 response includes many lessons that “first world countries” could benefit from implementing. Few countries have escaped the grasps of pandemic outbreaks, yet many have readily forgotten the realities of these health crises. The United States had the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, yet disbanded dedicated pandemic response teams in 2018. Conversely, African countries retained the health systems used for previous pandemics.

“Much of the success was attributable to the public health infrastructure that had been put in place before now. The emergency coordination structures— from the national to the state and below—were already there,” explains Chizoba Wonodi, MD, MPH, DrPH, director of Nigeria programs at the Johns Hopkins’ International Vaccine Access Center.

For example, much of the contact tracing measures implemented in countries like Nigeria drew from the experience of contract tracing for the previous Ebola outbreak response and from the emergency operating centers used for polio, Wonodi says. ...