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A further 38 people died of COVID-19, pushing SA’s death toll to 60 038 to date. Gauteng recorded 69% of the 12 222 new cases identified in the country.
The president also stressed the importance of keeping the economy open after months of stifling movement restrictions.
He urged citizens not to drop their guard and continue adhering to the health rules, such as wearing face masks and respecting curfew times.
South Africa has recorded just over 800,000 coronavirus infections - more than a third of the cases reported across the African continent - and over 20,000 deaths.
AFP
[New Times] While the resistance was identified in a laboratory experiment, the researchers say that it has not yet appeared among humans across the country.
In Africa, where the institute is present in nearly a dozen countries, the Pasteur Institute's Dakar facility plans to roll out potentially game-changing rapid testing kits, and has earned African Union designation as a coronavirus reference center.
Yet even as the African facilities are lauded for their work and state-of-the-art equipment, some see them entwined with France’s colonial legacy, amid growing calls for building a home-grown response to COVID-19 and other health crises.
Others, however, see Pasteur’s presence in places like Abidjan (Ivory Coast), Yaounde (Cameroon) or Antananarivo (Madagascar)—answerable to national health ministries and mostly staffed and headed by Africans—as an essential part of the continent’s research landscape and development.
France designates roughly $7.6 million in annual funding to Pasteur Institute facilities in Africa and Southeast Asia — many located in former French colonies—along with another $4 million for the current coronavirus response.
Pasteur Institute’s Girard says its facilities in Africa are essentially African ones — even if they get some French support.
But as cases increase, a May report by the Partnership for Evidence-Based Response to COVID-19 (PERC), a public-private partnership initiative on COVID-19 in AU countries, found that certain misconceptions about coronavirus infections exist among Africans.
The survey, which was conducted between March 29 and April 17, 2020, pools its data from \"social, economic, epidemiological, population movement, and security data\" from 28 cities across 20 AU countries to measure the \"acceptability, impact and effectiveness of public health and social measures for COVID-19.\"
Titled \"Responding to COVID-19 in Africa: Using data to find a balance\", the report finds that governments who fail to adapt their public health and social measures (PHSMs) to local needs risk unrest and violence among their population.
The report urged African governments, before considering reopening society, to build public health capacity to test, trace, isolate and treat cases.
PERC member organizations party to the report include: Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention; Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of Vital Strategies; the World Health Organization; the UK Public Health Rapid Support Team; and the World Economic Forum.
As cases of the new coronavirus climb and Kenyans are told to stay home and avoid human contact, 38-year-old Omondi moves house to house through Kawangware's maze of narrow lanes.
Charities such as Catholic Relief Services, which is supporting coronavirus training for about 5 000 community health volunteers in Kenya, say this workforce is key.
More than half of African countries have witnessed community transmission - cases where patients have no travel history or known contact with infected people - suggesting the virus is moving undetected in the population, says WHO.
Raj Panjabi, of Harvard Medical School and CEO of Last Mile Health, said community health workers showed their value when another deadly virus hit in Liberia.
Omondi, who has been working as a community health volunteer for 10 years without pay and is responsible for 100 households in her neighbourhood, would welcome some recognition.
The economy did not flourish under Mois rule. In the 1990s, Kenyas infrastructure began disintegrating and official graft was rampant, contributing to the withdrawal of much foreign aid. In early 1995, President Moi moved against the opposition and ordered the arrest of anyone who insulted him.
A series of disasters plagued Kenya in 1997 and 1998: severe flooding destroyed roads, bridges, and crops; epidemics of malaria and cholera overwhelmed the ineffectual health care system; and ethnic clashes erupted between the Kikuyu and Kalenjin ethnic groups in the Rift Valley. On Aug. 7, 1998, the U.S. embassy in Nairobi was bombed by terrorists, killing 243 and injuring more than 1,000. The embassy in neighboring Tanzania was bombed the same day, killing 10.
In a successful effort to win back IMF and World Bank funding, which had been suspended because of Kenyas corruption and poor economic practices, President Moi appointed his high-profile critic and political opponent, Richard Leakey, as head of the civil service in 1999. A third-generation white Kenyan, son of paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, he had been a highly effective reformer as head of the Kenya Wildlife Service. But after 20 months, during which he made a promising start at cleaning up Kenyas corrupt bureaucracy, Leakey was sacked by Moi. Kenya is regularly ranked among the ten most corrupt countries in the world, according to the watchdog group Transparency International.
An anticorruption law, sponsored by the ruling party, failed to pass in Parliament in Aug. 2001 and imperiled Kenyas chances for international aid. Opposition leaders called the law a cynical ploy meant to give the appearance of reform; the proposed law, they contended, was in fact too weak and full of loopholes to make a dent in corruption.
The Lancet on Thursday retracted a study that raised safety fears over the use of a drug favored by President Donald Trump to treat Covid-19, after the paper's authors said they could no longer vouch for its underlying data.
It was soon followed by the withdrawal of another coronavirus paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that was not linked to hydroxychloroquine but relied upon the same healthcare company's patient database.
In their paper published on May 22, the authors claimed to have retrospectively analysed some 96,000 patient records, finding that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, a related compound, were ineffective against Covid-19 and even increased the risk of death.
This finding led the World Health Organization to temporarily suspend clinical trials into the medicines, though the paper soon triggered widespread concern among scientists over a lack of information about the countries and hospitals that contributed data.
In their retraction statement, the NEJM paper's authors also wrote that the data was not made available to a third-party auditor.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said the total number of COVID-19 cases were at 814 565 on Sunday 6 December 2020.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) had estimated that Mauritius had the highest risk of exposure in Africa and would have the second highest rate of infections.
Increases in new cases in Africa have been relatively slow and death rates much lower than in other parts of the world.
In explaining why, some point out that many African countries have the advantage of low population densities and young populations.
A big part of the answer is that - like in many countries in Africa and unlike many in the Global North - the government in Port Louis heeded early warnings and acted promptly.
Among other things, the bill removes the night shift extra payment allowance, reduces annual leave from 21 to 7 days, makes overtime pay optional, and allows the police to arrest people without a warrant in cases of \"reasonable doubt\".
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been providing free-of-charge quality healthcare, water and basic relief items to people in eastern Burkina Faso since May 2019.
In the past two months, a new wave of attacks against remote villages in Burkina Faso's eastern region has uprooted thousands of families, who have fled to the towns of Gayeri and Fada.
A health system on the edge due to conflict and shortages
After four years of violence, the healthcare system in eastern Burkina Faso is very fragile.
The insecurity in eastern Burkina Faso is hampering aid efforts and poses enormous challenges in reaching some communities, especially people living in remote villages.
In Burkina Faso's eastern region, COVID-19 is not necessarily people's main concern: for thousands of displaced people and host communities, simply surviving is already hard enough.
[AIM] Maputo -- Malaria killed 365 people in Mozambique in the first six months of this year, out of 35,136 people seriously infected with the disease, according to Health Minister Armindo Tiago.
Family meeting confirmed: Ramaphosa will address SA on Thursday. You can catch it via our live stream, and find out what time things get underway here.
The accuracy of testing for the deadly COVID-19 virus by officials in Sierra Leone, has been in the spotlight since confirmation of the first group of cases two months ago.
Spokesperson for the National Covid-19 Emergency Response Center (NACOVERC) – Mr Solomon Jamiru gave this statement in defence of the government’s testing protocol:
“From 284 samples obtained, and 270 analysed, we announced 86 positive cases at our 11am press update today.
But as the debate continues about the effectiveness of the testing done by officials in Sierra Leone, the head of the National Response Centre – Brigadier Kallie Conteh in response to calls for some cases to be retested, said: “Firstly, Sierra Leone uses only the WHO approved PCR test kits, unlike others who choose to use the rapid test kit which, by the way is not an approved test kit by WHO.
“Given BBC Umaru Fofana’s report, the only thing that will explain the discrepancy between the COVID-19 testing results of the returnees from Kuwait is either someone (i.e. in Kuwait or Sierra Leone) deliberately or in error concluded false positives or faulty testing kits.
I am calling on government, the Ministry of Health, EOC and other relevant authorities to do proper testing of the different test kits available in our country to ascertain whether someone is positive or negative of Covid-19.
