The total confirmed COVID-19 cases in Cameroon has reached 10,140, according to Africa CDC’s real time statistics updated Tuesday morning, making it the sixth African nation that passed the 10,000 mark.

The death toll stands at 277, while number of recovered cases rose to 5,601, according to data from the Africa CDC.

Last week, the Cameroonian government said it will scale up testing capacity for COVID-19 to limit transmission. As of Monday, some 50,000 samples have been analyzed since the start of the pandemic in Cameroon in March, health minister Malachine Manaouda tweeted Monday evening.

“We will therefore strengthen our three-T (tracking-testing-treat) strategy and set a new testing target”, tweeted Manaouda.

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

Despite the increase of COVID-19 cases in the country, Cameroon eased some restrictions in May, and reopened schools for students in examination classes on June 1 to allow partial restoration of activities.

Source: Xinhuanet

Cameroon has recorded eleven deaths from coronavirus in twenty-four hours according to the Ministry of Public Health. One hundred thirty-six people have also died from the coronavirus pandemic, according to a news report by ‘cameroonmagazine.com’.

The daily press briefing by Dr. Fanne Mahamat on the situation of coronaviruses in Cameroon revealed that on Tuesday 12 May 2020, two thousand eight hundred people (2,800) had been diagnosed with the virus, of which one hundred and thirty-six died.

According to the director of health promotion at the Ministry of Public Health, confirmed cases increased on Tuesday as one hundred and eleven new people tested positive for COVID-19.

Prime Minister of Cameroon, Joseph Ngute on June 5 has appreciated the efforts of the public and said, “the figures to date are 6,789 positive cases, 4,565 cured and 203 deaths.”

Cameroon on March 5 became the first central African country to register a case of the virus. A 58-year-old French national who had arrived in the capital Yaounde in February.

Source: Devdiscourse

Cameroon’s government should immediately publish information on the revenues, disbursements, and management of its Health Solidarity Fund, Human Rights Watch said today.

Healthcare facilities have made mandatory contributions to this emergency fund for over 25 years. The government should also disburse funds to support healthcare facilities responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, if it has not already done so, and investigate any missing funds.

“Cameroon is the Central African country with the highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases, yet the government appears not to have disbursed funds from a reserve that healthcare facilities have been paying into exactly for emergencies like this one,” said Lewis Mudge, Central Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The health minister should immediately make the Health Solidarity Fund available to healthcare facilities in dire need of support, publish information about its transactions, and investigate any irregularities.”

Cameroonian law has required public primary care facilities to pay 10 percent of their monthly revenues to the Health Solidarity Fund since 1993. Hospitals are officially exempt, but medical staff told Human Rights Watch that they also pay into the fund. The fund should fall under the responsibility of the health ministry and was established to provide surge support during health emergencies. However, to the best of Human Rights Watch’s knowledge, after unsuccessfully seeking such information from the government, no information about the rules governing the fund or its activity has been published, making it vulnerable to corruption and misuse.

Human Rights Watch interviewed eight medical staff, including six doctors and two nurses, three lawyers, and several representatives from local nongovernmental organisations across Cameroon between April 6 and May 24, 2020. They all said they have no information regarding disbursements from the Health Solidarity Fund. Medical staff said that they believe that the government has never disbursed any money from it, including in response to Covid-19, and yet healthcare facilities continue to contribute 10 percent of their revenues. Human Rights Watch also wrote on May 11 to the health minister, inquiring about the rules governing the fund and its activities, but has received no response.

Cameroon had 8,681 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 208 deaths as of June 9, the majority in the cities of Yaoundé and Douala. The actual number of cases is most likely higher because testing is limited. In late March, the government asked citizens to contribute to the Special Fund of National Solidarity, which it established to provide additional support to efforts to curb the spread of Covid-19 and treat the sick. It also received US$226 million in emergency funding from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Healthcare facilities lack adequate resources to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. Healthcare workers interviewed reported shortages in basic hospital goods, including thermometers, disinfectants, and medicines, as well as ventilators and oxygen, and protective gear for doctors and nurses, such as masks, gloves, and glasses. Despite these shortages, the government has not provided any information about the revenues, balance, or disbursements of the Health Solidarity Fund, nor has it clarified any rules governing its use. The apparent lack of disbursement to support the health and economic crisis raises serious concerns that the money has been misused or lost to corruption.

As the World Health Organization has declared Covid-19 a pandemic, the health and economic crisis it has caused is sufficiently serious to trigger disbursements from the Health Solidarity Fund. A 2018 World Bank report sounded an alarm regarding the lack of rules or information on the fund, noting “it is not clear what the Solidarity Fund is used for” and “there is still no legislation about its use.” The report also raised concerns that transfers to the fund “are a key source of revenue-side inefficiency,” especially since primary care facilities are allotted a disproportionately small share of the health budget.

Healthcare workers echoed these concerns. A doctor based in the capital, Yaoundé, said:

There has always been lack of information about this fund. What is certain is that health facilities keep paying and if they don’t, they are sent reminder letters from the Ministry of Health. The use of the fund is not transparent. How much money is in there? Has it ever been used? There are all the ingredients for a slush fund. 

The lack of transparency is especially problematic because the fund’s revenues largely come from patient fees that drive up the cost of health care. As of 2018, 70 percent of the total health expenditure for the country was borne by households. Cameroonian households’ contributions to healthcare costs are the third highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the average is 34 percent.

Studies have shown that about 64 percent of households in Cameroon do not seek health care because they perceive the cost to be high. This poses unique dangers in the context of the ongoing pandemic because while the government has made testing free, people still need to pay for everything associated with treatment, which can be expensive. These costs could act as a disincentive to seeking care and lead to further poverty and an inability to access health services. While there are some insurance providers in the country, many are bankrupt and cannot pay the health facilities for the services offered to their members.

The government has retaliated against political opposition efforts to address shortcomings in official responses to Covid-19. On May 11, police arrested six volunteers from the Survival Initiative, a fundraising initiative by the opposition leader Maurice Kamto to respond to the health emergency, while they were handing out protective masks and sanitizing gel in Yaoundé. They were charged with rebellion, then released on May 15. But on May 23, security forces arrested three other volunteers from the group in Sangmelina, a city in the South Province. They were released on May 29.

Through the minister of territorial administration, the government has blocked fundraising initiatives sponsored by the opposition, as well as donations of protective masks and Covid-19 tests. The government refused to accept donated equipment from Survival Initiative, sparking criticism, particularly from health professionals, who complained about the lack of material to protect themselves and treat affected patients.

Corruption is prohibited under section 134 of the Cameroonian Penal Code, yet the country has a long, well-documented, and consistent problem with corruption. In recent years, the government has established ad hoc institutions to fight corruption, including the National Anti-Corruption Commission, the office of Supreme State Audit, and a Special Criminal Court. However, analysts, critics, and nongovernmental organizations have questioned whether these bodies have been effective and raised concerns that the government may be using anti-corruption bodies to crack down on political dissent.

“The government of Cameroon should urgently clarify whether money from the fund has been lost to corruption or misuse and establish clear rules and transparency requirements to prevent it from happening in the future” Mudge said. “For nearly 30 years Cameroonians paid dearly for the fund, and they should be able to rely on it to help them through this global pandemic.”

Culled from Human Rights Watch

The speed the new coronavirus jumped from 100,000 to 200,000 confirmed cases in Africa shows just how quickly the pandemic is accelerating on the continent, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

According to an AFP tally, Africa topped the 200,000 mark on Tuesday.

“It took 98 days to reach the first 100,000 cases, and only 18 days to move to 200,000 cases,” Doctor Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa, told a video briefing hosted by the UN press association in Geneva.

“Even though these cases in Africa account for less than three percent of the global total, it’s clear that the pandemic is accelerating.”

The novel coronavirus has infected nearly 7.4 million people worldwide and killed at least 416,000 since the outbreak emerged in China last December, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP.

Africa has reached 5,635 deaths from 210,519 confirmed cases, according to AFP’s count at 1100 GMT on Thursday.

In Africa, “the pandemic is still concentrated in and around capital cities but we are seeing more and more cases spread out into the provinces,” Moeti said.

She said that in most countries on the continent, the virus entered capitals through international flights from Europe.

– South Africa worst affected –

“Ten of the 54 countries in Africa are currently driving the numbers,” Moeti explained, with those states accounting for 80 percent of cases.

South Africa accounts for nearly 25 percent of the continent’s total cases.

“The majority of countries still have fewer than 1,000 reported cases,” said Moeti.

“There is community transmission in more than 50 percent of countries, however.”

Meanwhile more than 70 percent of the deaths have occurred in just five countries: South Africa, Algeria, Nigeria, Egypt and Sudan.

Moeti said that while it was possible that some asymptomatic and mild cases were going undetected, WHO Africa believed that large numbers of severe cases and deaths were not being missed on the continent.

Africa’s relatively young population compared to other continents, and in-built experience of dealing with disease outbreaks have been cited as reasons why Africa has not so far seen the death rates experienced on other continents.

Moeti said early action by African countries had helped keep the numbers low — but constant vigilance was still needed.

Asked by AFP how she saw the pandemic developing in Africa, Moeti said the continent had not seen the sustained exponential rise in cases previously witnessed in Europe and the United States.

“Until such time as we have access to an effective vaccine, I’m afraid we are probably going to have to live with a steady increase in the region, with some hotspots having to be managed in a number of countries, as is happening now in South Africa, in Algeria, in Cameroon, which really require very strong public health measures,” she said.

“We’re hoping very much not to see health systems overwhelmed with large numbers of people who are ill,” she said.

Source: AFP

Nobel winner Denis Mukwege on Wednesday said he had resigned as head of a coronavirus taskforce in an eastern province of DR Congo, blaming organisational problems, outpaced strategy and slow testing.

Mukwege, a DR Congo gynaecologist who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for his work against sexual violence in war, was appointed on March 30 to lead a committee in South Kivu province.

Panzi Hospital, where Mukwege treats abused women, is also located in the province.

In a statement, he said there had been “weaknesses in organisation and clarity between the various teams in charge of the response to the pandemic in South Kivu.”

“We are at the start of an exponential… curve (in infections) and we can no longer apply a strategy that would be purely preventive,” Mukwege said.

“I have decided to resign… in order to devote myself entirely to my medical duties and to treat the influx of patients at Panzi hospital.”

He said he regretted that it took “more than two weeks” to get coronavirus test results from the national reference lab in Kinshasa — “a major handicap for our strategy based on ‘testing, identifying, isolating and treating’.”

Mukwege also criticised developments that he said had “reduced the effectiveness” of the anti-virus campaign.

They included a relaxation in vigilance by the public, hurdles in enforcing distancing and the return of thousands of people from neighbouring countries without quarantine.

Mukwege had pleaded in mid-April for partial confinement of people over the age of 60 and compulsory mask-wearing for everyone to help break the chain of virus transmission.

On May 9, he called for “emergency supplies” of tests “before the exponential curve (of infections) gets underway.”

The Democratic Republic of Congo has declared 4,390 infections, including 3,980 in Kinshasa and 89 in South Kivu and a total of 96 deaths.

Source: AFP

World Health Organization (WHO) in Cameroon on Monday began a five-day capacity building training for some health authorities in a bid to support the country’s COVID-19 fight.

Officials said the training was timely, given the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the country.

“This training is to train people who have come from the regions in order for them to go back and train colleagues in the district hospitals and district management centers in management, infection prevention and control,” Phanuel Habimana, WHO representative for Cameroon told reporters at the start of the training in the capital Yaounde, adding that WHO has the responsibility to fight against the pandemic together with local medical workers.

The training will arm medical workers, especially in rural areas, with the knowledge and skills to fight the pandemic that has so far affected all the 10 regions of the country.

Cameroon COVID-19 cases exceeded 8,000 on Sunday, including 206 death and more than 4,500 recoveries.

Source: Xinhuanet

Lockdowns imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19 have saved millions of lives and easing them now carries high risks, according to two international studies published on Monday.

“The risk of a second wave happening if all interventions and all precautions are abandoned is very real,” Samir Bhatt, who co-led one of the studies by researchers at Imperial College London, told reporters in a briefing.

Most European nations, worried about the economic impact of their lockdowns, have started to ease restrictions as the number of new COVID-19 cases falls.

The Imperial study analysed the impact of lockdowns and social distancing steps in 11 European countries and found they had “a substantial effect”, helping to lower the infection’s reproductive rate, or R value, below one by early May.

The R value measures the average number of people that one infected person will pass the disease on to. An R value above 1 can lead to exponential growth.

“But any claims that this is all over, that we’ve reached the herd immunity threshold, can be firmly rejected,” Bhatt said. “We are only at the beginning of this pandemic.”

The Imperial team estimated that by early May, between 12 and 15 million people in total in Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland – around 4% of their combined population – had been infected with COVID-19.

By comparing the number of deaths counted with deaths predicted by their model if no lockdown measures had been introduced, they found some 3.1 million deaths were averted.

A second study by scientists in the United States, published alongside the Imperial-led one in the journal Nature, estimated that lockdowns in China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France and the United States had prevented or delayed around 530 million COVID-19 cases.

Focusing on those six nations, the U.S. team compared infection growth rates before and after the implementation of more than 1,700 local, regional and national policies designed to slow or halt the spread of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

They found that without anti-contagion policies in place, early infection rates of SARS-CoV-2 grew by 68% a day in Iran and an average of 38% a day across the other five countries.

“Without these policies, we would have lived through a very different April and May,” said Solomon Hsiang, who co-led the second study at the University of California, Berkeley.

(REUTERS)

Cameroon’s Minister of Public Health, Dr. Malachie Manaouda on June 4 has launched a new drug structure in the fight against coronavirus in the presence of the Korean Ambassador, according to a news report by ‘journalducameroun’.

“Set up within the framework of the fight against the COVID-19, the structure, Mediline Medical Cameroon SA, will also be specialized in the supply will focus on the importation and distribution of pharmaceutical products, supply chain, medical equipment, medical consumables, reagents, and food supplements,” Dr. Malachie Manaouda said.

Stakeholders said at the launch of the structure that for a start, it will have two logistics centers based in Douala and Yaounde while for its logistical deployment, the company has a Cheyenne-type cargo plane with a capacity of half a ton for the rapid and secure transportation of these products to the ten regions of Cameroon. The distribution chain is supported and secured by software that guarantees the management, tracking, and traceability of all products.

“Cameroon has these past years invested huge efforts in the in terms of health and continue to do so within this health crisis. I am delighted to see the setting up of this structure which is a fruit of the cooperation between our countries and we know it will go a long way to improve on the health of the population, “outgoing Korean Ambassador, Bok Ryeol Rhyou said.

Culled from Devdiscourse

Cameroon says hundreds of hospital patients have fled health facilities after a jump in cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Cameroon has about 7,400 confirmed cases and more than 205 deaths from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. Patients say they are afraid of catching the coronavirus at hospitals, but health officials warn that not getting needed treatments for other health issues can put them at higher risk.

 The highest number of patients who have fled hospitals are in the western towns of Bamenda and Bafoussam; the capital, Yaounde; and the economic capital of Douala, where confirmed cases of COVID-19 are increasing daily, said Health Minister Manaouda Malachie.

Each time a special ward for COVID-19 patients is created in a hospital, Manaouda said, Cameroonians worry that if they go to that hospital, they will contract the illness. He stressed that hospital wards dedicated to COVID-19 patients are separated from wards caring for other patients. However, he added, President Paul Biya has instructed the government to build special care centers for COVID-19 cases.

About 600 patients have fled from health facilities, while thousands of others are avoiding hospitals for fear of becoming infected, according to Manaouda.

Thirty-one-year-old banker Wilfred Awemo said he decided to seek African traditional treatment for his malaria because he no longer trusts hospitals in Cameroon.

“When you go with a little illness like this, most especially when you have a health complication and then you are going for checkup, they will just take your temperature and if it goes above 37, they just say that you are a suspect and they try to quarantine you,” he said.

Authorities are putting all suspected coronavirus cases under quarantine. If a person tests negative, he or she is still kept under observation for 14 days.

Dr. Getrude Ashu, who is working with the public health ministry, said the government has sent out representatives to encourage people to visit hospitals and to stop going to traditional healers.

“We are trying to sensitize the population that it is not in all hospitals and that the probability of contracting COVID in the hospital is just the same as getting it in the marketplace or in the church or in the community,” Ashu said. “So, we just require them to protect themselves when they go to the hospitals and respect all the preventive measures. We will not have any problems.”

Since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Cameroon three months ago, government and health workers have been asking civilians to consider the situation as a serious health threat and refer suspected cases to hospitals.

The government says confirmed cases continue to rise because many people either do not believe the coronavirus exists, or refuse going to hospitals for treatment until their symptoms worsen.

Source: VOA

Cameroon has recorded the highest number of Covid-19 related deaths in the past 24 hours compared to other central African countries, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said on Monday.

Cameroon recorded 197 deaths, the DRC 72, Chad 65, the Republic of the Congo 20, Gabon 17, Equatorial Guinea 12, while Sao Tome and Principe each recorded 12.

At least 5,564 more people in Africa tested positive for the coronavirus over the past 24 hours, according to the health agency of the African Union.

The total number of infections on the continent reached 147,099, said the organisation, with the death toll currently standing at 4,228.

The total number of recoveries climbed to 61,808 as 2,596 patients recovered over the past 24 hours.

North Africa recorded a total of 43,900 Covid-19 cases; west Africa 35,100, southern Africa 34,900, East Africa 17,000 and Central Africa 16,100.

In terms of the death toll, North Africa had 1,900 fatalities, west Africa 717, southern Africa 707, east Africa 513 and Central Africa 398.

The worst-hit country in terms of number of infections was South Africa, currently sitting on 32,700 cases. Egypt follows with 25,000.

In terms of Covid-19-related deaths, Egypt recorded 959 cases and South Africa 683.

In West Africa, Nigeria registered 287 deaths, Mali 77, Niger 64, Burkina Faso 53, Sierra Leone 46, Senegal 42, Ghana 36, Cote d’Ivoire 33, Liberia 27, Guinea 23 and Togo 13.

In East Africa, Sudan had recorded 286 fatalities, Somalia 78, Kenya 64, Djibouti 24, Tanzania 21, Ethiopia 11 and South Sudan and Mauritius 10 each.

In Central Africa, Cameroon reported 197 deaths, the DRC 72, Chad 65, and Republic of the Congo 20; Gabon reported 17 fatalities, Equatorial Guinea 12, while Sao Tome and Principe also reported 12 each.

Since the virus emerged last December in the Chinese city of Wuhan, it has spread to at least 188 countries and regions.

African News Agency (ANA)