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The Legatum Institute in London hosted a webinar this week, gathering medical expertise on COVID-19 from Europe and China to share with African delegates preparing for their own wave of the coronavirus.
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Introducing the event, the Chinese ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, called for international unity. “We should reach a consensus,” he said, “and support the World Health Organization to play an important role in the global response to the pandemic. Respect African wishes, listen to African voices and support African initiatives.”
Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Center for Disease Control, emphasized the importance of medical intervention at the earliest possible stage, even putting mild and suspicious cases into medical care to remove them from the community.
And Zhang Wenhong, from Fudan University, Shanghai, emphasized the importance, in China’s view, of facial masks to resist community spread, saying that stricter measures were only possible by maximizing community support. .
David Heymann, an experienced international epidemiologist, said the biggest problem now facing European countries is how to handle the current exit strategy from the national shutdown. He said Asian countries had benefited from containing the disease earlier in their pandemics.
People stand inside drawn circles to show social distancing measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 as they wait for the bus in Rwanda. / Simon Wohlfahrt / AFP
People stand inside drawn circles to show social distancing measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 as they wait for the bus in Rwanda. / Simon Wohlfahrt / AFP
Joy Ruwodo, regional director of public affairs for Africa at The END Fund outlined some of the concerns facing African medical authorities.
“Staying at home is going to mean working from home or studying from home,” he said. “Which means we have many other factors to think about: electricity, the internet, and internet-related tools have become vital products.”
The community broadcast seemed to be the final headline for this extraordinary conference. The more nations can do to aggressively isolate the disease in its early stages with extensive medical intervention, quarantine, testing and hospitalization of even suspected cases, the more deaths can be avoided. The United States and Europe are tragic examples of what happens when community transmission gains momentum within a national population, and how fast the virus can spread.
