Is Sub-Saharan Africa prepared for COVID-19?

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Abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), is the latest virus to cause global health panic. Due to the rapidly escalating numbers of new infections outside China, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020, in a message delivered by Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director-General [ 1]. As of March 21, about 166 countries globally had recoded cases of the COVID-19 in only 4 months since its outbreak in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China [ 2, 3]. With the Antarctic continent unaffected, Africa, in particular Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), has recorded the least number of cases, despite the cited moderate-to-high risk of infection [ 4]. The biggest challenge is whether Sub-Saharan Africa is ready for this pandemic.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Edwin Nuwagira: enuwagira@must.ac.ug

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Trop Med Health

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Trop Med Health

Title: Tropical Medicine and Health

Publisher: BioMed Central (London )

ISSN (Print): 1348-8945

ISSN (Electronic): 1349-4147

Publication date (Electronic): 10 April 2020

Publication date PMC-release: 10 April 2020

Publication date Collection: 2020

Volume: 48

Electronic Location Identifier: 18

Affiliations

GRID grid.33440.30, ISNI 0000 0001 0232 6272, Infectious Diseases Unit, Department of Medicine, , Mbarara University of Science and Technology, ; P.O Box 1410, Mbarara, Uganda

Article

Publisher ID: 206

DOI: 10.1186/s41182-020-00206-x

PMC ID: 7146014

PubMed ID: 32288543

SO-VID: 71e99024-58f4-40c1-9f7a-8c3c39a075c3

License:

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

History

Date received : 19 March 2020

Date accepted : 30 March 2020

Custom metadata

ScienceOpen disciplines: Medicine

Keywords: covid-19,sub-saharan africa

Data availability:

ScienceOpen disciplines: Medicine

Keywords: covid-19, sub-saharan africa

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