Robots, algorithms and containments: the African country with only 322 deaths and a very low rate of infections

While the world is doing its best to produce vaccines and halt the spread of the coronavirus, in an African country, Rwanda, with 12.6 million inhabitants, only 322 coronavirus deaths have been recorded over a year after the start of the pandemic, with a daily infection rate of just 57 cases.

Rwanda’s situation differs not only from the rest of the world, but also from its immediate neighbors. In Tunisia, the daily cases are around 2017, in Ethiopia 1812, in South Africa 1200 and in Egypt 840.

The coronavirus, like in any other country, has taken the people of Rwanda by surprise, publishes Infobae. The doctor and director general clinical epidemiologist of the Biomedical Center of this country, Sabin Nsanzimana, said that “although we observed other diseases such as Ebola virus in our laboratory, SARS-CoV-2 was different due to panic and panic. communication that circulated around the world ”.

“We had to retest this sample three times to be sure that it was the first infected in Rwanda,” adds the professional about the first contagion detected.

The former Rwandan Minister of Health highlighted the success of the fight against the pandemic and allowed some criticism to escape. “The Western sense of democracy has totally failed, and Covid-19 is proof of that. Those countries where someone said you don’t need a mask or a chin strap, that’s a lie, they know it, science has proven it, but they say it for political reasons, out of selfishness. Politics is a deadly weapon, ”he said.

One of the keys to mitigating the impact was the use of robots in medical centers to protect healthcare workers. Likewise, strict confinements have been ordered on several occasions and trade with neighboring countries has been suspended, with the exception of goods and basic necessities.

They also highlight the rapidity of vaccination beyond the few doses that have reached the country. A few days ago, the Covax Fund allocated the first 350,000 doses of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine and in nine days 250,000 people were vaccinated.

One of the most famous decisions in Rwanda to reduce traffic and adopt adequate sanitary measures has been the implementation of algorithm-based sampling, which made it possible to alleviate the lack of resources to test the entire set. the population, a problem that worries the world and that has been exposed with the saturation of health systems.

The algorithm helps to refine the testing processes based on lots of groups of people. Individual tests are performed if a specific lot is positive. For local scientists, sampling based on a mathematical approach makes the process of detecting contagions more efficient. In turn, it acts faster with infected people, and the expectations that generally favor the circulation of the virus are reduced.

For Sema Sgaier, professor of global health at Harvard University, the Rwandan method “is an example of the incredible solutions in conditions of extreme scarcity of resources” which have come out of the continent.