Stretched Senegalese hospitals overwhelmed by third wave of COVID



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DAKAR, July 29 (Reuters) – Idrissa Lo returned to Senegal from the United States when members of her family began to fall ill with COVID-19 and die.

On Wednesday, he mourned a fifth member of his family lost to the virus – one of nearly 150 Senegalese to die this month as a third wave swept through the capital Dakar, leaving his hospitals nearly overrun.

“The one I lost two hours ago is my very close cousin. He was young, he was around 40,” said Lo, a US-based transport worker, standing in the sunny courtyard of the building. hospital in the Yoff district of Dakar. .

“Something’s going on – it’s a real crisis.”

Senegal, which until this month had recorded less than 44,000 cases and 1,166 deaths, has recorded more than 15,000 cases and 139 deaths since the beginning of July, according to figures from the Ministry of Health.

After comfortably resisting the first two waves of the virus, health services were now dangerously stretched, said Dr Khardiata Diallo, head of infectious diseases at Fann hospital in Dakar.

“Patients, especially younger ones, come in respiratory distress,” said Diallo, his voice broken with exhaustion. “We’ve never had this number of cases, deaths and serious cases. Frankly, this third wave threatens to drown us.”

Many infections outside of clinics went undiagnosed, while autopsies were not routine, she said. “The situation is much more serious. What we are seeing here is just the tip of the iceberg.”

A health worker loads an oxygen cylinder into an ambulance outside the infectious disease ward at Fann University Hospital in Dakar, amid a wave of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases in Senegal on July 28, 2021. Photo taken on July 28, 2021.REUTERS / Zohra Bensemra

In Dakar, the current epicenter of the epidemic in Senegal, every bed of supplemental oxygen for patients with severe respiratory distress has been taken, she said.

Diallo said the hospital was not running out of oxygen, even though demand was so high that delivery people said some of them were working nights to keep pace.

Like many African countries facing a third wave of infections, Senegal is more vulnerable because so few people are vaccinated. It has administered less than a million doses to a population of around 16 million people, according to government data.

Overall, cases in Africa have exploded in recent weeks, hitting a new record of nearly 50,000 new daily infections in early July.

The Senegalese Ministry of Health has pledged to step up vaccinations and this week welcomed new deliveries from Chinese Sinopharm and Johnson & Johnson as well as a delivery of doses of AstraZeneca as part of the COVAX global distribution program.

The West African nation plans to build a factory to make COVID-19 vaccines. Production is expected to begin later this year. The facility will produce 25 million doses per month by the end of 2022. read more

At Yoff hospital, hundreds of people lined up for a vaccine on Wednesday. Many had arrived before dawn and expected to spend most of the day in line.

“We are seeing 13-year-olds infected, people in their twenties dying,” said Ndeye Dia, 58, who had been lining up for an injection since 6 a.m. “It’s total panic now.”

Reporting by Alessandra Prentice and Christophe Van der Perre; Editing by Aaron Ross and Nick Macfie

Our Standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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