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MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) – As richer countries rush to distribute COVID-19 vaccines, Somalia remains the rare place where large parts of the population have not taken the coronavirus seriously. Some fear it will be more deadly than anyone knows.
“Certainly our people are not using any form of protective measures, no masks or 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 across the country, nobody even talks about it.” And yet infections are on the rise, he says.
It is places like Somalia, the Horn of Africa nation torn by three decades of conflict, that will be the last to receive COVID-19 vaccines in significant quantities. With part of the country still being held by the extremist al-Shabab group linked to Al-Qaida, the risk of the virus becoming endemic in some hard-to-reach areas is high – a fear for parts of Africa due to the slow arrival of vaccines.
“There is no real or practical investigation into the matter,” said Hirabeh, who is also the director of Martini Hospital in Mogadishu, the largest patient treated with COVID-19, which has seen seven new ones. patients the day he spoke. He acknowledged that neither the facilities nor the equipment are adequate in Somalia to fight the virus.
Less than 27,000 tests for the virus have been carried out in Somalia, a country of more than 15 million people, one of the lowest rates in the world. Less than 4,800 cases have been confirmed, including at least 130 deaths.
Some fear that the virus will enter the population like another misdiagnosed but deadly fever.
For Hassan Mohamed Yusuf, a 45-year-old street beggar, this fear has turned into a virtual certainty. “At first we saw this virus as another form of the flu,” he said.
Then three of her young children died after coughing and having a high fever. As residents of a makeshift camp for people displaced by conflict or drought, they did not have access to coronavirus testing and proper care.
At the same time, Yusuf said, the virus has hampered his efforts to find money to treat his family as “we can’t be close enough” to people to beg.
At the start of the pandemic, the Somali government attempted to take action to limit the spread of the virus, closing all schools and shutting down all domestic and international flights. Cell phones were ringing with messages about the virus.
But social distancing has long since vanished from the streets, markets or restaurants of the country. On Thursday, some 30,000 people crowded into a Mogadishu stadium for a regional football match without face masks or other anti-virus measures in sight.
Mosques in the Muslim nation have never been restricted for fear of backlash.
“Our religion taught us hundreds of years ago that we should wash our hands, faces and even legs five times a day and that our women should take veils because they are often weaker. So that’s the whole prevention of the disease, if it really exists, ”said Abdulkadir Sheikh Mohamud, an imam from Mogadishu.
“I left it to Allah to protect us,” said Ahmed Abdulle Ali, a trader in the capital. He attributed the increased coughing during prayers to the change of seasons.
A more important protective factor is the relative youth of the Somali people, said Dr Abdurahman Abdullahi Abdi Bilaal, who works in a clinic in the capital. Over 80% of the country’s population is under 30 years old.
“The virus is there, absolutely, but people’s resilience is due to age,” he said.
It is the lack of post-mortem investigations in the country that allows the true extent of the virus to go undetected, he said.
The next challenge in Somalia is not just to get the COVID-19 vaccines, but also to persuade the population to accept them.
It will take time, “just like it took our people to believe in polio or measles vaccines,” said a worried Bilaal.
Hirabeh, responsible for the virus response in Somalia, agreed that “our people have little confidence in vaccines,” saying many Somalis hate needles. He called for serious awareness campaigns to change his mind.
The logistics of any COVID-19 vaccine deployment is another major concern. Hirabeh said Somalia is waiting for the first vaccines in the first quarter of 2021, but he fears the country has no way of dealing with a vaccine like Pfizer’s that needs to be stored at minus 70 degrees Celsius.
“One that could be kept between minus 10 and minus 20 could be suitable for the third world like our country,” he said.
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