Africa has a COVID-19 time bomb to defuse

by Tolbert Nyenswah | Source: World Economic Forum

• Africa’s healthcare systems will be overwhelmed when coronavirus cases escalate.

• Africa has little hope of support when countries like the US cannot supply its healthcare workers with personal protective equipment.

In Liberia, the first case of COVID-19 came from someone who brought the disease from Switzerland. This traveller’s household cook was the next in Liberia to test positive for the infection.

This is not the way it is supposed to work. According to the stereotypes, it is the working class in the slums of a non-industrialized country – in this story, that would be the cook – who transfers the infection to the traveller, who then brings the contagion to the industrialized nation. But we do not live in stereotypical times.

Think back to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a few years back. Seven out of the 28,646 suspected cases escaped the African continent in three and a half years and yet the industrialized world was in a full-scale panic.

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