Coronavirus: Tanzania and Somalia

I last wrote about Tanzania back in June 2020 in a "don't trust the numbers" posts. Of course, it was too easy to write that post, because the country simply wasn't tracking cases anymore. At the time, I speculated that there must be hundreds of thousands of cases already in the country. Perhaps that estimate was too aggressive at the time, but it does appear that the virus is spreading across the country (even though they still aren't reporting numbers).

DW (Feb 9) reports:

Since December 2020, Tanzanians have grown warier about the pandemic. With rising deaths attributed to "acute pneumonia," many residents have abandoned carelessness and are taking the virus seriously.

Zanzibar's First Vice President Seif Sharif Hamad was taken ill by the virus, according to his party, ACT Wazalendo, at the end of January. His wife and aides were also infected.

. . . In January, two cases of the new South African strain — thought to be more contagious — were discovered in air travelers returning from Tanzania by Denmark's Statens Serum Institut (SSI), which specializes in infectious diseases.

One of my speculations early in the pandemic was that if individuals who travelled from a country (such as Italy and Iran) were found to have the virus in their home countries, it was surely an indication that the country they visited had far more virus spread than what was being reported. If a country was only reporting a handful of cases, what were the chances that a traveler would be in contact with just those few individuals. To me, the above Denmark situation is a similar indication.    

CNN (Feb 11) adds:

Covid-19 case numbers in Tanzania have risen considerably since January, says the United States embassy in the country's largest city, Dar es Salaam.

. . . "The U.S. Embassy is aware of a significant increase in the number of COVID-19 cases since January 2021," it said in a statement on Wednesday. "The practice of COVID-19 mitigation and prevention measures remains limited."

. . . Magufuli has also refused to acquire vaccines for the population of 58 million, saying they are "dangerous" and "not good for us."

Is it possible that the virus was kept under control up until January? I wonder if the spread of the virus was driven by Christmas and New Year's Eve celebrations just like in the United States (add in Thanksgiving). 

The LA Times (Jan 3) reports about Somalia:

“Certainly our people don’t use any form of protective measures, neither masks nor social distancing,” Abdirizak Yusuf Hirabeh, the government’s COVID-19 incident manager, said in an interview. “If you move around the city [of Mogadishu] or countrywide, nobody even talks about it.” And yet infections are rising, he said.

It is places like Somalia, the Horn of Africa nation torn apart by three decades of conflict, that will be the last to see COVID-19 vaccines in any significant quantity. With part of the country still held by the Al Qaeda-linked al-Shabab extremist group, the risk of the virus becoming endemic in some hard-to-reach areas is strong — a fear for parts of Africa amid the slow arrival of vaccines.

I think the comments about the fact that there will be a lack of vaccinations in both Tanzania and Somalia indicate to me that the virus will become endemic in Africa. This includes the fact that other countries in Africa will see a slower roll-out of the vaccinate compared to Europe and North America. 

Per Worldometer, Africa has only 4.1 million cases. Of which, close to 38% are in South Africa. Yes, perhaps the virus is spreading more slowly across Africa than it has across Europe and the United States, but does it sound at all realistic that 38% of all cases are just in one country? And South Africa happens to be just the 6th largest country by population. 

The fact that some countries just won't be getting the vaccine anytime soon indicates to me that the virus will continue to gain strength on the continent and will stay there for years. The one lucky situation for Africa is the age of their population (of course, perhaps a variant will develop that will be deadly to a younger population). 

Of course, perhaps a side comment, I wonder what the situation in Africa means for the coronavirus policies of New Zealand and Australia. Can they continue to keep their borders shut to the outside world? Almost 10% of New Zealand's economy was based directly or indirectly on tourism. Maybe we do get to a point where North America and Europe gain some control of the virus spread, but will cases go down to zero? And even if New Zealand and Australia vaccinate everyone, what are the chances that a variant enters the country that can evade the current vaccines? To me, the longer the governments keep their nations locked up (enforcing a 2 week quarantine), the worse the economic impact.