NAIROBI,
Kenya
The
Kenyan government said Tuesday it has ramped up interventions aimed at
containing COVID-19 disease in the rural counties that have lately witnessed a
spike in caseload.
Rashid Aman, chief administrative
secretary in the Ministry of Health, said the country is not yet out of the
woods yet despite low positivity rates in the capital Nairobi and the coastal
city of Mombasa that were previously regarded as the pandemic’s hotspots.
Aman said that rising COVID-19
infections in several rural counties could derail efforts to flatten the curve.
“While as we have witnessed the
number of positive cases decline in Nairobi and Mombasa, some rural counties
have recorded a spike and therefore we must continue to adhere to containment
measures,” Aman said at a briefing in Nairobi on Tuesday.
He said that positivity rates
were below 5 percent in Nairobi and Mombasa as opposed to several rural
counties that were recording more than 7 percent rate of infection.
Aman said that Kenya’s ability to
flatten the curve in the near future hinged on robust investment in COVID-19
mitigation measures in the rural counties.
“The communities living in rural
and peri-urban counties should maintain social distancing, wear face masks and
avoid large gatherings in order to minimize the risk of contracting COVID-19,”
said Aman.
He said that devolved units
should partner with the central government to increase the number of hospital
beds, boost their testing and contact tracing capacity, in order to avert an
implosion in cases and fatalities.
Aman warned county governments
against relaxing containment measures amid risk of a secondary and tertiary
wave of infection that could overwhelm local healthcare infrastructure.
He said that a decline in
COVID-19 cases countrywide that accelerated in mid-July, reaffirmed the
effectiveness of containment measures that should be ramped up in the emerging
rural hotspots.
According to Aman, eastern Kenyan
counties of Machakos, Kitui and Meru had experienced a spike in infections
while Busia County that borders Uganda had also emerged as a pandemic hotspot.
Kenya’s COVID-19 caseload reached
35,356 on Tuesday after 151 patients including 77 women and 74 men tested
positive to the disease.
No single death was reported in
the last 24 hours and the national fatality tally remained at 599 while 173
patients recovered from the virus, raising the cumulative number of recoveries
to 21,483.
Public health specialists hailed
the decline in positive cases but stressed that rural counties deserved
adequate resources to revitalize anti-COVID-19 war amid fragile health systems,
poverty and inadequate testing that could hamper efforts to defeat the virus.
Githinji Gitahi, CEO of Amref
Health Africa, said that deployment of additional health workers combined with
improved testing, tracing and isolation infrastructure in rural counties is key
to reduce COVID-19 caseload and deaths.
“The rural counties were late in
experiencing transmissions and therefore any efforts to suppress the virus and
prevent a second wave of transmission should be channeled there,” Gitahi said
during an interview at a local television station.
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