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Floods razed roads, bridges and a hospital in Uganda and an entire small town in Somalia, while torrential rain in East Africa compounded the problems for governments struggling to respond to the new coronavirus.
Hundreds of people have been killed by floods in Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, Rwanda and Ethiopia, which have also displaced hundreds of thousands across the region.
Heavy rains flooded areas around Mount Rwenzori in western Uganda after the Nyamwamba River erupted on its banks, forcing more than 100,000 people to seek refuge in nearby schools and destroying roads and bridges, a senior government official said.
“What complicates the matter is that this is the era of COVID. People are expected to maintain social distance, but how to maintain distance in such a situation? Julius Mucunguzi, a spokesman for the prime minister’s office, said by phone.
One of the area’s hospitals, Kilembe, was also overrun by rough waters despite being built on a raised bench and reinforced with sandbags.
“There are neighborhoods that were completely washed out. The morgue was swept away. You wouldn’t know that there was once a morgue there. Drugs and pharmacies were dragged through the trash, “said Mucunguzi.
In Ethiopia, the eastern Somali region of the country has suffered the brunt of the floods, which have displaced more than 100,000 people, said the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
In neighboring Somalia, an unspecified number of people died when the floods devastated an entire small town in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, authorities said.
The heavy rains come from moisture dumped in the region by winds from the Indian Ocean, where temperatures have increased in recent months, said Chris Shisanya, professor of climatology at Kenyatta University, based in Nairobi.
“This is a handover from what we had last year,” he said, referring to floods and landslides in the region.
The floods killed nearly 200 people in Kenya, which have also displaced 100,000 more.
“This is exacerbating the COVID-19 response,” said Kenyan Ministry of Health chief administrative secretary Rashid Aman at a press conference.
“The displaced have been forced to congregate in makeshift camps at the risk of uniting and exposing them to the possibility of contracting the virus.”
The official deaths recorded by COVID-19 are at least 102 in East Africa, where the virus came later than many other parts of the world.
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