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(Journalist)
– 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 do not use any form of protective measures, neither masks nor social distancing,” Abdirizak Yusuf Hirabeh, the government official for COVID-19 incidents, told Mogadishu. “If you move around town or across the country, nobody even talks about it.” Still, 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 see COVID-19 vaccines in significant quantities, the AP reports. With part of the country still held by the extremist al-Shabab group linked to Al-Qaida, the risk of the virus becoming endemic in hard-to-reach areas is high – a fear for parts of Africa. And getting people to accept vaccines will take time, “just like it took for our people to believe in polio or measles vaccines,” a doctor said.
Neither facilities nor equipment are adequate in Somalia to combat the virus, Hirabeh admitted. Fewer than 27,000 coronavirus tests have been conducted in the country of 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, 45, a street beggar, this fear has turned into virtual certainty. “At first we saw this virus as another form of the flu,” he said. Then three of her young children died after developing a cough and high fever. As residents of a makeshift camp for internally displaced people, they had no access to testing and treatment. And the virus has hampered his efforts to find money to treat his family, Yusuf said: “We cannot get close enough” to people to beg. Very early on, the government took action, closing schools and shutting down flights. But social distancing has disappeared in public spaces. On Thursday, some 30,000 people crowded into a Mogadishu stadium for a football match without face masks or other anti-virus measures in sight.
(Read more stories about Somalia.)
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