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Weekly COVID-19 Pandemic Briefing – Experience and Response in Africa Transcript Webinar: Weekly COVID-19 Pandemic Briefing – Experience and Response in Africa Professor David Heymann CBE Distinguished Fellow, Global Health Programme, Chatham House, Executive Director, Communicable Diseases Cluster, World Health Organization (1998-2003) Dr John Nkengasong Director, Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) Chair: Emma Ross Senior Consulting Fellow, Global Health Programme, Chatham House Event date: 03 June 2020 The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the speaker(s) and participants, and do not necessarily reflect the view of Chatham House, its staff, associates or Council. Chatham House is independent and owes no allegiance to any government or to any political body. It does not take institutional positions on policy issues. This document is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the author(s)/speaker(s) and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of the publication or details of the event. Where this document refers to or reports statements made by speakers at an event, every effort has been made to provide a fair representation of their views and opinions. The published text of speeches and presentations may differ from delivery. © The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2020. 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE T +44 (0)20 7957 5700 F +44 (0)20 7957 5710 www.chathamhouse.org Patron: Her Majesty The Queen Chair: Jim O’Neill Director: Dr Robin Niblett Charity Registration Number: 208223 2 Webinar: Weekly COVID-19 Pandemic Briefing – Experience and Response in Africa Emma Ross Good morning, and thank you for joining us for this week’s Chatham House COVID-19 briefing with Chatham House Distinguished Fellow, David Heymann, who, as many of you know, is a renowned expert on outbreak control, who spearheaded the global response to the SARS outbreak in 2003. He now Chairs the Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on Infectious Hazards, which is advising the WHO Emergencies Department on the response to this pandemic. The theme this week is on experiences and responses in Africa. So, today we have with us Dr John Nkengasong, an eminent Virologist with 30 years in public health under his belt, who’s currently the Director of the Africa Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which is at the heart of the response across Africa. So, welcome, John. John, I was hoping we could start with an overview from you. Could you start us off by sharing your assessment of the COVID- 19 situation in Africa? Dr John Nkengasong Yes, thank you. Let me, first of all, ask my team is projecting my screen, and thank you for the opportunity to share this conversation with you, and greetings from Addis Ababa, from the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at the heart of the African Union, and I’d also like to thank David for reaching out to inviting us to be part of this very exciting conversation, and I hope it will be. Let me say that, as my slides are projected, there are three key messages that I wanted to leave with you, and that is starting with the end in mind. One is that the pandemic in Africa has been a delayed pandemic. Second message is that it is expanding, and thirdly, is that it required a strong co-ordination within the continent and a strong expression of solidarity across the world to be – for Africa, to enable Africa to cope with this. So, I have a few slides just to use that to at least substantiate the three elements that I just mentioned. What you see in front of you here, and I would like to start with that, because it shows a military aircraft behind, with respondents from the Democratic Republic of Congo, that are heading – and that military craft is donated by the government of Cameroon to Africa CDC to go and lift up responders from the Democratic Republic of Congo and deposit them in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, and Cameroon. So, these are really – and the colleagues you see in green there are from DRC, they have been fighting Ebola with us for the past close to three years, and because of the Ebola outbreak in North Kivu was coming down and coming to an end, we – the expertise was needed in other countries then. Unfortunately, as you are all aware, there’s now a new outbreak in Équateur in Mbdanka, so that – I use that to show the extraordinary co-ordination that is going on within the continent, and the only reason that we will be able to use a military aircraft to transport people across multiple countries is because the Peace and Security Council of the AU is wholly behind the efforts of the Africa CDC. They recognise this as a serious economic threat, a serious health threat, and a serious security threat for the continent, and then to be able to unlock the airspaces across multiple countries for this to happen, was an extraordinary event or project. So, I’d like to – I wanted to start with that to emphasise the importance of co-ordination that the continent is championing. Next slide. Just to start with, I mean, we know this, and this that we – over six million people infected globally with about 370,000 deaths. Next slide. Then, if we look inside the continent carefully, as we speak today, the continent of Africa has reported 157,000 cases of COVID-19 with about 4,500 deaths, and 67,000 have recovered. The graph shows here the – by colour, the different regions, and by how much increase that we see per week, and, for example, if we look at the block arrows there, they indicate the number of increases, and over last week from West Africa, then Southern Africa, North and to Central Africa. 3 Webinar: Weekly COVID-19 Pandemic Briefing – Experience and Response in Africa Next slide. So, this slide maybe shows you a little bit more content of what I just provided and is really emphasised – and the take home point is that the new cases are increasing quickly, over the days and weeks. We are seeing, next slide, an increase of about 3,000 to 4,000 new cases a day. One of the greatest challenge we see on the continent is testing. As a continent, as of yesterday, we have conducted about 2.4 million tests. That comes down to about 1,652 tests per million population, with a positivity rate of 6.4%. So, there are two messages here, that our testing rates, if you look at it over the last couple of months, is – well, is low, but it’s increasing, as you can see in the curve there, so all is not that dark. But we have a long way to go to get to at least 1% of testing, that is a population of 1.2 billion people, if we have to test 1% of the population, we really need to be testing about 12 million – conducting 12 million tests on the continent. Next slide. So, this slide shows you a snapshot of some of the countries that are really driving this and the pandemic on the continent, so it’s not a homogenous pandemic, it’s very heterogenous. The top five countries that are driving that are shown on this slide are South Africa with 35,000 cases, followed by Egypt with 27,000 cases, Nigeria 10,000, Algeria 9,600, and Ghana 8,600. Next slide. I would like to make a point that our pandemic is very heterogenous, even within each region, so I would like to just very quickly go through five slides. Slide you’re seeing here is the Central Africa region, and has about ten countries, and you can see there, there are three countries that are really driving this – the pandemic in Central Africa, that is Cameroon, DRC and Gabon. At the bottom part of that you see a cluster of countries, that they are – is rising, but I can say that it’s really not taking off significantly, and I will come back to that in a while, but the three countries out of ten driving that are those indicated there. Next slide. Then you look at East Africa and top in East Africa is Sudan, followed by Djibouti and Somalia, and Kenya is catching up, just below the Somalia red line there. Then you have, again, like in Central Africa, a cluster of countries right down, which are just seen as slow progression, but also – but steadily, slowly and sluggishly increasing. Next slide. Then in North Africa, of course Egypt is really still seeing a very rapid increase in the rate of new infections, followed by Algeria and Morocco. The rest of the countries at the bottom part of the curve shows you a cluster of countries that are seeing rather a more stable progression of that – of COVID-19. Next slide. In Southern Africa, it’s a very unusual epidemiologic situation we are seeing. South Africa is right up there with, as I said, more than 30,000 cases and the rest of the countries are really down on the lower part of the curve there. Next slide. And, lastly, in West Africa, you see Nigeria and Ghana, and very distinct, and then, in the middle of the curve, you see Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, and then a set of countries are right below there, and the West Africa is a region of about 15 countries, and you see the rest of the countries clustering below there.
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