Coronavirus: Don't Believe the Numbers out of Tanzania

Perhaps it is too easy to question Tanzania's coronavirus cases. You have a president that doesn't want to release case counts. Yet there is a problem with keeping your head in the sand. A country could end up like Brazil and have a major outbreak overwhelm their healthcare system. This overwhelmed healthcare system has also occurred in countries like Italy, but it is better to know the wave is coming versus just ignoring it all together.

Indications that the infection rate in Tanzania is far higher than reported (obviously) comes from other countries via trade routes.

BBC (May 22) reports:

The transmission of the virus across Tanzania's borders is of particular concern to its neighbours.

. . . Testing is being carried out on people travelling out of Tanzania and into Kenya, Zambia and Uganda (and in some cases being sent back if they're positive).

. . . There is a similar situation in Kenya - officials are testing lorry drivers before they are allowed into the country.

So far this month, more than 100 people arriving from Tanzania have tested positive for coronavirus and been sent back.

. . . At Ugandan border testing points, at least 15 Tanzanian lorry drivers have tested positive this month. 



That's 115 cases right there. How many people are infected because of these 115? Thousands, perhaps. One thing going for Tanzania is that it has a very young demographic. Per World Population Review, the average age is just 17.7. Due to this, those dying from the virus should be very low.

What's also interesting about the BBC article is that there is a photo of a church worship. If it is recent, which the article seems to imply, there definitely isn't any social distancing occurring at that church.

The Washington Post (May 22) looks into the trade route story in more detail. One of my thoughts when reading the BBC story was, "Are they doing rapid testing? How accurate could those tests be?" The answer is no. They're doing the regular testing that can take 2 weeks for results to be known. That no doubt is causing the virus to spread even more within Tanzania and no doubt into Kenya due to the shared border town of Namanga:

The truckers’ growing web of interactions points to a dilemma at international borders: how to let essential trade through without the virus slipping in with it. At a meeting Friday to resolve the growing crisis, Kenya and Tanzania agreed that starting next week, drivers will have to get negative test certificates before starting their journeys. For many of the thousands of truckers who have already spent days or weeks in Namanga waiting for tests, that decision will have come too late.

“If my results come back positive, who can say how many people I’d have infected?” said Ali, 47. “I’m almost sure most of us here have now got the virus.”

. . . Jenny Heri, 39, and Marcy Mwajuma Kioko, 32, said they get paid to have sex with six to 10 trucker clients a day, mostly Tanzanians. On Wednesday, they were on the Kenyan side to pick up hundreds of condoms at a government clinic, as well as change Tanzanian shillings into Kenyan shillings to wire home to their children.

If you read the Washington Post article, they write that 150 truckers tested positive at the Kenyan border crossing versus the 100 plus mentioned in the BBC article. Also, there isn't any indication about what these infected drivers do? Do they just go home and keep working? Do they go home and self-isolate?

The town of Namanga only has a population of 5,500. Who wants to bet that most of the people in that town are now infected with COVID-19 due to truckers hanging around for 2 weeks or so? And also note that prostitutes seem to easily cross the border between Kenya and Tanzania. So even though Kenya is attempting to prevent the infection from entering the country via testing of truckers, they apparently are allowing prostitutes cross the border.

I'll say this, if Kenya can identify over 100 cases of the virus at their border, there must be 100,000s of cases right now in Tanzania.