The Government of the United Kingdom has a lot to learn from its African counterparts.
That’s what The Guardian, the British edition, writes about.
The media recalled that at the dawn of the Coronavirus pandemic, experts made “apocalyptic” predictions about the spread of COVID-19 in Africa. Experts speculated on how the epidemic would turn out for countries where income and quality of health care is several levels lower than in the UK or Italy?
“But it also turned out that many African countries, which early on realized that large-scale, costly testing and hospitalization was not an option, had no choice but to be more creative”, – the article says.
As an example, the author suggests Senegal and Ghana be considered. The first African state is developing a COVID-19 test kit, which will cost only 1 dollar and can show the result within 10 minutes.
It notes, however, that Senegal began seriously preparing for a pandemic back in January, when the first warnings of a new deadly virus appeared. At that time, the government closed borders and implemented a comprehensive plan to track contacts.
“As a result, only 30 of the 16 million people in that country have died. Each death was recognized by the Government individually, and compensation was paid to the family. You can afford to see each death as an individual when the numbers are at that level. At each of these stages, Britain has acted in the opposite way, and now the death toll exceeds 35,000”, – writes The Guardian.
In Ghana, with a population of 30 million, the numbers are similar thanks to an “extensive contact tracking system involving a large number of health workers and volunteers”.
Also among Ghana’s “innovative methods” is “group testing”. It involves testing several blood samples at once. If a coronavirus is found in the study, specialists start testing each sample individually.
“The benefits of this approach are currently being studied by the World Health Organization”, – the publication said.