The World Health Organisation (WHO) has listed Nigeria and twelve other African countries as high-risk nations in the continent for Coronavirus infection.

Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Tanzania, Mauritius, Algeria, DR Congo, Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, South Africa, and Uganda were identified as African countries with a high volume of travel or direct links to China.

The statement by WHO read as follows:

WHO has identified 13 top priority countries (Algeria, Angola, Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia) which either have direct links or a high volume of travel to China.

To ensure rapid detection of the novel coronavirus, it is important to have laboratories which can test samples and WHO is supporting countries to improve their testing capacity. Since this is a new virus, there are currently only two referral laboratories in the African region which have the reagents needed to conduct such tests.

However, reagent kits are being shipped to more than 20 other countries in the region, so diagnostic capacity is expected to increase over the coming days. Active screening at airports has been established in a majority of these countries and while they will be WHO first areas of focus, the organization will support all countries in the region in their preparation efforts.

It is critical that countries step up their readiness and in particular put in place effective screening mechanisms at airports and other major points of entry to ensure that the first cases are detected quickly.

WHO is already ramping up novel Coronavirus preparedness efforts in the Sub-Saharan African region and supporting them to effect outlined recommendations by the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee, which met in Geneva, Switzerland on January 30th, 2020. The committee also affirmed that the faster the virus is detected, the quicker it can be contained to ensure it does not overwhelm health systems of the affected nations.

Justin Nwosu

Justin Nwosu is the founder and publisher of Flavision. His core interest is in writing unbiased news about Nigeria in particular and Africa in general. He’s a strong adherent of investigative journalism, with a bent on exposing corruption, abuse of power and societal ills.