Country’s TB, HIV history prepares it for corona testing
JOHANNESBURG (AP):
SOUTH AFRICA, one of the world’s most unequal countries with a large population vulnerable to the new coronavirus, may have an advantage in the outbreak, honed during years battling HIV and tuberculosis: the know-how and infrastructure to conduct mass testing.
Health experts stress that the best way to slow the spread of the virus is through extensive testing, the quick quarantine of people who are positive, and tracking who those people came into contact with.
“We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation and a former Ethiopian health minister, said recently.
South Africa has begun doing just that with mobile testing units and screening centres established in the country’s most densely populated township areas, where an estimated 25 per cent of the country’s 57 million people live.
SCREENING A MUST
Clad in protective gear, medical workers operate a mobile testing unit in Johannesburg’s poor Yeoville area. In the windswept dunes of Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township, centres have been erected where residents are screened and those deemed at risk are tested.
While most people who become infected have mild or moderate symptoms, the disease can be particularly dangerous for older people and those with existing health problems, such as those whose immune systems are weakened or who have lung issues. That means many in South Africa — with the world’s largest number of people with HIV, more than eight million, and one of the world’s highest levels of TB, which affects the lungs — are at high risk of getting more severe cases of the disease.
“Social distancing is almost impossible when a large family lives in a one-room shack. Frequent hand-washing is not practical when a hundred families share one tap,” said Denis Chopera, executive manager of the Sub-Saharan African Network for TB/HIV Research Excellence.
“These are areas where there are high concentrations of people with HIV and TB who are at risk for severe symptoms. These are areas that can quickly become hot spots,” said Chopera, a virologist based in Durban.
But years of fighting those scourges has endowed South Africa with a network of testing sites and laboratories in diverse communities across the country that may help it cope, say experts.
“We have testing infrastructure, testing history and expertise that is unprecedented in the world,” said François Venter, deputy director of the Reproductive Health Institute at the University of Witswatersrand. “It is an opportunity that we cannot afford to squander.”
The country imposed a threeweek lockdown March 27 that bought it some time, said Venter.