There is increasing evidence that more Cameroonians are dying at home from COVID-19 as the health system gets overwhelmed. Reports from Douala say many people are dropping dead in their houses and are buried by family members using traditional protocols which do not comply with globally recognized health protocols.

Many people are scared of being quarantined and are simply avoiding government health facilities that are noted for declaring many patients COVID-19 positive even when they are suffering from other ailments. There are reports that people suffering from erectile dysfunction, diabetes and hypertension have been declared COVID-19 positive without tests by health officials in Cameroon and left to die in COVID-19 wards.

According to the Cameroon Concord News Group’s Chairman, Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai, the drama playing out in Cameroon’s hospitals needs to be investigated and ‘we have our reporters on the ground who will give us first hand information’.  More will be yours.

By Chi Prudence Asong

Confirmed cases of coronavirus across Africa passed the 100,000 mark barely 24-hours after the deaths hit 3,000. This is according to tallies from the John Hopkins University tracker.

The figures as of May 22 14:30 GMT stood at 100,399 with 39,481 recoveries and 3,098 deaths. The number of active cases stood at 57,82.

The five most impacted nations were as follows:

• South Africa: 19,137 confirmed cases
• Egypt: 15,003
• Algeria: 7,728
• Morocco: 7,300
• Nigeria: 7,016

South Africa is the most impact across the continent and in the southern African region. Egypt tops across North Africa and Nigeria in West Africa. Cameroon is the leader in Central Africa with 4,288 cases whiles Sudan tops in the East / Horn of Africa region with 3,138 cases.

Source: Africa News

The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said its partners have provided health, water and sanitation, and hygiene support, including mobile clinics, disease screening and Covid-19 sensitisation, to more than 450,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the north-west and south-west regions of Cameroon.

The agency said government and humanitarian partners were also providing distance learning to more than half of the children affected by school closures in both regions through radio, TV and printed material.

More than 6,370 schools and 4,200 community learning centres in the regions have been closed since March to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Authorities have announced the potential reopening of schools in June.

Food distribution to displaced people was also expected to increase following the development of revised guidelines and risk mitigation measures by the food security cluster and supporting partners. In April, Covid-19-related restrictions meant that food assistance reached only 10% of beneficiaries, leaving more than 150,000 people without support, OCHA said.

“More than 1.4 million people in the north-west and south-west regions are food insecure, with numbers gradually increasing every month,” the statement read.

The humanitarian co-ordinator in Cameroon has also met the secretary-general of the south-west region governor’s office, to improve collaboration and co-ordination with the government’s humanitarian co-ordination centres.

The agency said this is also aimed at strengthening transparency among humanitarian partners, including support for the Covid-19 response.

Besides the IDPs in the north-west and the south-west, Cameroon also has 200,000 IDPs in other parts of the country. Some 58,000 Cameroonians are refugees in Nigeria.

So far, Cameroon has recorded 3,529 Covid-19 cases and 140 deaths.

Source: African News Agency

Medical staff in Cameroon are asking for additional security at hospitals following a series of attacks by people upset that they or their loved ones were diagnosed with the coronavirus. Cameroon so far has 3,300 confirmed cases of the virus with 147 deaths.

Gervais Gabriel Atedjoe, secretary general of Cameroon’s National Medical Council, said attacks on hospitals, especially health care workers, are increasing by the day.

Speaking by phone from the coastal city of Douala, Atedjoe said health workers are being attacked by people who either contest tests showing them positive for COVID-19, or reject medical reports that their relatives died of coronavirus.

He said the National Medical Council of Cameroon is scandalized and wants to state categorically that it is totally inadmissable to attack medical staff members who are simply carrying out their duties of saving lives. He said they are asking the government to increase protection at hospitals and to educate civilians to desist from attacking health workers because within the past three weeks, medical doctors, nurses and laboratory technicians have been attacked on a daily basis.

The Medical Council reports attacks in seven hospitals since Thursday. Six workers sustained injuries and are being treated, and eight others sustained minor injuries.

In the most extreme attacks, doctors said that last week, angry crowds exhumed at least four corpses of people buried after they died of COVID-19 in the cities of Douala and Bafoussam to stop the spread of the killer virus.

The exhumers said they wanted to give the bodies a proper burial.

Some people wear masks as they walk by the entrance to the Yaounde General Hospital in Yaounde on March 6, 2020 as Cameroon has…

Awah Fonka, governor of Cameroon’s Western Region where Bafoussam is found, said health workers who tried to stop the crowds were attacked and beaten.

Fonka, speaking via a messaging app from Bafoussam, said the lives of the health workers were saved only when the police arrived and dispersed the mobs. Police and health care workers then reclaimed and reburied the bodies.

“It is unbelievable, unacceptable that a medical doctor or medical personnel should be putting up a fight over a corpse with a family. They [the crowds] should understand that these people [the health care workers] are coming to help so that they should not be infected,” said the governor.

Cameroon’s Health Minister Manaouda Malachie has condemned the attacks and said he is calling on all Cameroonians to accept the reality that COVID-19 exists and is killing people.

Speaking on Cameroon state radio CRTV, he said measures have been taken to increase security at hospitals.

He said President Paul Biya has asked him to encourage and tell all health workers that he is aware of the challenges they face and has given instructions to the government to take necessary measures to protect them. Manaouda says Biya and his government are very much appreciative and will never abandon Cameroon medical staff members in their efforts to conquer COVID-19.

On May 1st, Cameroon eased restrictions put in place to curb COVID-19. The government is still asking people to protect themselves by washing their hands regularly and keeping a distance of a least a meter and a half from people.

It has also warned people against believing that COVID-19 has been conquered, or even worse, doesn’t exist.

Source: VOA

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the first African to head the World Health Organization, faces the towering challenge of coordinating a global pandemic response increasingly complicated by US-China tensions.

The former Ethiopian minister of health and foreign affairs finds himself at the heart of global efforts to rein in the novel coronavirus, which has now killed more than 300,000 people and infected close to five million.

On Monday, Tedros opens the UN health agency’s main annual event, the World Health Assembly, which due to the pandemic will be held virtually and has been trimmed from the usual three weeks to just two days.

Amid the COVID-19 outbreak, Tedros said the event would be “one of the most important (WHAs) since we were founded in 1948”.

Countries hope to adopt by consensus a resolution urging a joint response to the crisis, but the efforts have been clouded by steadily deteriorating relations between the world’s two largest economies.

Trump last week threatened to cut ties with China, where the outbreak began late last year, over its role in the spread of COVID-19, and has repeatedly made unproven allegations that the virus originated in a Chinese lab.

– Biggest challenge –

The US president has also ramped up criticism of Tedros and WHO, accusing them of being too close to China and mismanaging the pandemic response.

And last month, Trump announced that Washington, the biggest contributor to the UN health agency, would suspend its funding.

The pandemic, combined with the threat of lost US funding, clearly constitutes the biggest challenge to date in the WHO director-general’s three-year tenure.

But Tedros, 55, a malaria specialist with degrees from Britain in public health and immunology, and the first person ever elected to the helm of the WHO, should have the legitimacy and strong support to weather the storm.

Tedros is renowned for his warmth and a tendency to call everyone from colleagues to world leaders “brother” or “sister”, setting him apart from the famously cool persona of his appointed predecessor, Margaret Chan of China.

And his handling of the crisis has drawn widespread praise.

“Tedros is the best director general that I have worked with, perhaps since Gro Brundtland,” renowned US epidemiologist Larry Brilliant told AFP, referring to the former Norwegian prime minister who served as WHO chief from 1998 to 2003.

“He is an incredibly smart, open, honest, science-based man.”

– ‘Politicising’ the pandemic –

While he always seems to have a smile lurking under his trimmed moustache, Tedros has also revealed a fiery side.

After a hefty barrage of criticism from Trump last month, Tedros warned that “if you don’t want many more body-bags then you refrain from politicising” the pandemic.

During that virtual briefing on April 8, Tedros also revealed that for months he had faced a virulent campaign of abuse against him, including racist comments and death threats.

“I don’t give a damn… I am proud of being black or proud of being negro,” he said.

Tedros has also come under increasing pressure over Taiwan, which at the behest of China has been excluded from the WHO and other international bodies, amid growing calls for it to be granted access to the WHA.

Taiwan has, like Trump, harshly criticised the UN agency and its chief for being too willing to believe Beijing and praise its handling of the outbreak.

On social media meanwhile, a battle is raging between the pro- and anti-Tedros camps. The WHO chief himself has joined the virtual fight, retweeting messages of support from a range of African leaders, other political actors and scientists.

– ‘Firm, courageous’ –

“I’ve known Dr Tedros for 27 years… He is a man of great principle, and his calm but firm, courageous leadership of WHO during this terrible COVID-19 pandemic is exactly what the world needs right now,” tweeted Laura Hammond, a University of London professor.

He also has a knack for diplomacy.

During the 2017 election, he highlighted his drive as health minister to expand basic healthcare by building thousands of clinics and boosting community-based health services, and vowed to give the WHO a similar overhaul, with an emphasis on global health coverage.

When he took over, the organisation was undergoing far-reaching reforms after mismanaging the initial response to the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, which killed more than 11,300 people between 2013 and 2016.

But just a few months into his tenure, he created a scandal by appointing Zimbabwe’s then-president Robert Mugabe as a WHO goodwill ambassador. He was forced to backtrack.

That gaffe however has largely been forgotten, as the WHO under Tedros has scaled up emergency response capabilities and astutely responded to two new Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Source: AFP

The total number COVID-19 cases registered in Cameroon has surpassed 3,000, according to statistics updated Saturday by World Health Organization (WHO).

According to WHO, 3,047 cases have been detected in Cameroon, including 139 deaths. The current fatality rate is about 4.56 percent, higher than the fatality rate in Africa as a whole.

The continuous rise in the number of infections was a result of increased testing capacity across the country, according to Fanne Mahamat, Director of Health Promotion in Cameroon’s Ministry of Public Health.

Cameroon reported its first coronavirus infection on March 6, an imported case from Europe, and has closed national borders, schools and applied social distancing since March 18.

On April 30, Cameroonian Prime Minister, Joseph Dion Ngute announced that, the government decided to ease some of the social distancing restrictions by allowing bars and restaurants to run after 6 p.m., and lifting passenger number restriction in public transport.

On Friday, Ngute issued technical guidelines for schools nationwide to reopen in an orderly manner. Only examination classes in primary and secondary schools will resume classes on June 1.

Source: Xinhuanet

The new coronavirus could kill 150,000 people in Africa in a year unless urgent action is taken, according to a WHO modelling study that says nearly a quarter of a billion people will be infected.

Authors of the research, published Friday in the journal BMJ Global Health, predicted a lower infection rate than in other parts of the world like Europe and the US, with fewer severe cases and deaths.

But while they said many African nations had been swift to adopt containment measures, they warned that health systems could still quickly become overwhelmed.

“Our model points to the scale of the problem for health systems if containment measures fail,” said the authors.

The study comes amid stark warnings that COVID-19 threatens a health emergency in developing nations where fragile health systems are already struggling with an array of other chronic diseases.

Experts at the World Health Organization’s Africa office modelled likely rates of exposure to the virus and infection in the 47 countries under its regional remit, which excludes Djibouti, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan and Tunisia.

Some 231 million people, or 22 percent (with a range of 16 to 26 percent) of the one billion people in the region were expected to be infected in the 12 month period — most of them showing few or no symptoms.

But an estimated 4.6 million people would need to be admitted to hospital, while 140,000 would have severe COVID-19 infection and 89,000 would be critically ill.

That would lead to some 150,000 deaths (between 83,000 and 190,000) the study suggested.

The modelling estimates what would happen for each country over the period of a year from the beginning of widespread and sustained community transmission.

Researchers warned that surging hospital admissions for COVID-19 would divert already limited resources to tackle major health issues in the region, such as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and malnutrition, worsening the impact of coronavirus.

“The region will have fewer deaths, but occurring more in relatively younger age groups, amongst people previously considered healthy –- due to undiagnosed non-communicable diseases,” the report said, adding that these trends were already emerging.

The researchers said they expect the virus would likely circulate within the region for longer than other countries, possibly for several years.

Transmission was estimated to be greatest in small nations, with Mauritius found to have the highest risk of exposure. Of the region’s large countries, South Africa, Cameroon and Algeria were also in the top ten for exposure risk.

The authors calculated this risk by looking at each country’s “gathering factor” (including family size and population density), people’s likely ease of movement, sanitation and hygiene practices.

 They also included weather. It is not known if warmer temperatures slow down the spread of COVID-19, though some research has suggested it has that effect on other coronaviruses.

Researchers factored in each country’s measures to control the spread of the virus, including physical distancing.

They also looked at health risk factors — proportion of the population over 65, HIV prevalence (as a proxy for chronic communicable conditions) and diabetes (as a proxy for non-communicable chronic illness).

They called for countries to rapidly boost healthcare capacity, particularly in primary hospitals.

This month the United Nations said the number of deaths from AIDS-related illnesses in sub-Saharan Africa could double if the provision of healthcare to HIV sufferers is disrupted during the coronavirus crisis.

(Source: AFP)

Cameroon’s traditional healers say they are being overwhelmed by the number of people seeking herbal medicine for prevention or treatment of the coronavirus.  The rush for traditional healing comes as the central African nation confirms more than 2,500 cases of COVID-19 and 121 deaths.  But medical doctors caution the use of herbal medicine for the coronavirus.

Traditional healer Dewah, who only uses a first name, says his chain of herbal medicine clinics across Cameroon have been flooded with patients since the March outbreak of the coronavirus.

He spoke via a messaging application from the southwestern town of Kumba.

Dewah said in the last two months he has received at least 800 people from Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Chad who say they are rushing for African herbal medicine because they have been told there is no modern cure for COVID-19.

The demand for herbal medicine is so high, said Dewah, that he could not treat some patients because he ran short of the potions made from plants he harvests from the forest.

Despite a lack of scientific evidence, he claims the potions can treat all the symptoms of COVID-19 and even save the infected from death.

Dianne Sop, a traditional healer in Yaounde, said in the last month she too has received about 200 patients seeking treatment for the coronavirus.

Sop said on Tuesday morning alone she received 10 patients but had to send four away because she is still waiting for more herbal medicines.

Medical researchers, doctors, and the Cameroon government have urged patients not to rely on traditional medicine for COVID-19 and to instead seek treatment at hospitals.

Douala city pharmacist Merilyne Peyou notes many Cameroonians do not live near hospitals but have easy access to traditional medicine. 

She said many drugs sold in hospitals and pharmacies in Africa originate from herbs and tree leaves that were effectively used to treat Africans before the arrival of modern medicine. The only challenges of African herbal medicine, said Peyou, are that it is difficult to preserve, may become toxic, and healers don’t always know what dosage to prescribe.

Cameroon’s Ministry of Public Health released a statement Thursday warning of quacks claiming they can treat COVID-19 to financially exploit people suffering from or worried about the virus.

Gidiun Peliegho, a researcher on African traditional medicine, said authorities should work to identify which herbs can treat COVID-19 and help to develop a cure.

“We need both financial and moral assistance.  This is not the time for us to keep on doubting what African traditional medicine can do. What interests us now the most is getting to rescue the world population that is suffering.”

The World Health Organization notes the use of products to treat COVID-19 that have not been robustly investigated can put people in danger.

In a May 4 statement, the WHO said untested and unproven medicines give a false sense of security and distract from proven measures such as hand washing and physical distancing.

Source: VOA

Scientists have found evidence for mutations in some strains of the coronavirus that suggest the pathogen may be adapting to humans after spilling over from bats.

The analysis of more than 5,300 coronavirus genomes from 62 countries shows that while the virus is fairly stable, some have gained mutations, including two genetic changes that alter the critical “spike protein” the virus uses to infect human cells.

Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine stress that it is unclear how the mutations affects the virus, but since the changes arose independently in different countries they may help the virus spread more easily.

The spike mutations are rare at the moment but Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious diseases and a senior author on the study, said their emergence highlights the need for global surveillance of the virus so that more worrying changes are picked up fast.

“This is exactly what we need to look out for,” Hibberd said. “People are making vaccines and other therapies against this spike protein because it seems a very good target. We need to keep an eye on it and make sure that any mutations don’t invalidate any of these approaches.”

Studies of the virus revealed early on that the shape of its spike protein allowed it to bind to human cells more efficiently than Sars, a related virus that sparked an outbreak in 2002. The difference may have helped the latest coronavirus infect more people and spread rapidly around the world.

Scientists will be concerned if more extensive mutations in the spike protein arise, not only because they may alter how the virus behaves. The spike protein is the main target of leading vaccines around the world, and if it changes too much those vaccines may no longer work. Other potential therapies, such as synthetic antibodies that home in on the spike protein, could be less effective, too.

“This is an early warning,” Hibberd said. “Even if these mutations are not important for vaccines, other mutations might be and we need to maintain our surveillance so we are not caught out by deploying a vaccine that only works against some strains.”

The scientists analysed 5,349 coronavirus genomes that have been uploaded to two major genetics databases since the outbreak began. By studying the genetic makeup of the viruses, the scientists worked out how it has diversified into different strains and looked for signs that it was adapting to its human host.

In an unpublished study that has yet to be peer reviewed, the researchers identified two broad groups of coronavirus that have now spread globally. Of the two spike mutations, one was found in 788 viruses around the world, with the other present in only 32.

The study shows that, until January, one group of coronaviruses in China escaped detection because they had a mutation in the genetic region that early tests relied on. More recent tests detect all of the known types of the virus.

Last month, an international team of scientists used genetic analyses to show that the coronavirus likely originated in bats and was not made in a lab as some conspiracy theorists have claimed.

(Source: The Guardian)