Learning From Ebola, Africa Is Now Better Prepared For COVID-19

Corona illustration (amrothman / pixabay)

JAKARTA - Since being detected in Wuhan at the end of December 2019, COVID-19 has claimed more than 2,700 lives in China. This virus has also spread to a number of other countries including Europe and Africa.

Such events remind us too, of the dangers of the Ebola virus which are also frightening for many countries. Africa is also one of the countries worst affected by the Ebola virus.

Armed with this experience, Africa is now better prepared to anticipate the corona virus that has plagued many countries. One such example is in West African countries including Senegal, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Nigeria.

These countries are now better prepared to deal with COVID-19 than richer countries with more sophisticated health systems. This was conveyed by Gyude Moore, a former minister for public works in Liberia.

In the aftermath of Ebola, these countries are now more concerned about how to deal with viruses that are easily transmitted. They learned what tools they used during Ebola so that they could be re-applied when tackling COVID-19.

As with the Ebola outbreak, it is evident that health systems and workers will always depend on the efforts of local people to adopt simple but important behavior changes, such as washing their hands consistently.

Not only learning what they are doing, Africa has also prepared a number of preventive steps to anticipate that the outbreak does not reach its country.

One of them is quarantine measures. When Ebola first broke out, the government still did not understand how to deal with it and did not quarantine it. Now they understand that people with a highly contagious virus must be quarantined to narrow the outbreak.

"We are trying to quarantine the whole community like we see China is doing but it proved ineffective because you have to engage with each other (society and the authorities)," said Gyude Moore, as summarized from Quartz Africa.

Reporting from a BBC report, Africa has built two medical laboratories in Senegal and South Africa as a reference for checking the corona virus. The Pasteur de Dakar Institute, in Senegal has long been at the forefront of medical innovation in Africa, including in yellow fever research.

Other countries such as Ghana, Madagascar, Nigeria and Sierra Leone also followed suit and announced that their laboratories could carry out COVID-19 tests.

Even though it is often said to be a poor and 'weak' country, in fact Africa has actually been transformed into a country that is strongest against disease outbreaks such as corona. It is exemplary how this country has successfully adapted from African ways to cope with the outbreak.