MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) – As richer countries rush to spread COVID-19 vaccines, Somalia remains the rare spot where many of the population has not taken the coronavirus seriously. Some fear it is more deadly than anyone knows.
“Our people certainly do not use any protective measures, nor any masks or social distance,” Abdirizak Yusuf Hirabeh, the COVID-19 incident manager of the government, said in an interview. “When you move in the city (Mogadishu) or countrywide, no one even talks about it.” And yet infections are on the rise, he said.
These are places like Somalia, the Horn of Africa torn apart by three decades of conflict, which is the last to see COVID-19 vaccines in any significant amount. While part of the country is still owned by the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab extremist group, the risk of the virus becoming endemic is in some hard-to-reach areas – a fear of parts of Africa amid the slow arrival of vaccines.
“There is no actual or practical investigation into the matter,” Hirabeh said. He is also director of the Martini Hospital in Mogadishu, the largest treating COVID-19 patient, which saw seven new patients the day he spoke. He acknowledged that facilities or equipment in Somalia were not sufficient to deal with the virus.
Less than 27,000 tests for the virus were conducted in Somalia, a country with more than 15 million people, one of the lowest percentages in the world. Less than 4800 cases have been confirmed, including at least 130 deaths.
Some are worried that the virus will subside in the population as another bad diagnosis but deadly fever.
For 45-year-old street beggar Hassan Mohamed Yusuf, that fear turned into almost certainty. “In the beginning, we saw this virus as just another form of flu,” he said.
Then three of his young children died after coughing and high fever. As residents of a temporary camp for people displaced by conflict or drought, they had no access to coronavirus tests or proper care.
At the same time, Yusuf said, the virus hampered his efforts to get money to treat his family, as ‘we can not get close enough’ for people to beg.
Early in the pandemic, the Somali government tried several measures to curb the spread of the virus, closing all schools and closing all domestic and international flights. Mobile phones ring with messages about the virus.
But social distance has long disappeared in the country’s streets, markets or restaurants. On Thursday, about 30,000 people plugged into a stadium in Mogadishu for a local football match without face masks or other antivirus measures in sight.
Mosques in the Muslim nation have never faced restrictions, for fear of the reactions.
‘Our religion taught us hundreds of years ago that we should wash our hands, faces and even legs five times every day, and that we should take women’s veils because they are often weaker. So it is the whole prevention of the disease if it really exists, ”said Abdulkadir Sheikh Mohamud, an imam in Mogadishu.
“I left the matter to Allah to protect us,” said Ahmed Abdulle Ali, a shop owner in the capital. He attributes the increase in cough during prayers to the changing of seasons.
A more important protective factor is the relative youth of Somalis, said dr. Abdurahman Abdullahi Abdi Bilaal said. More than 80% of the country’s population is younger than 30 years.
“The virus is absolutely here, but the resilience of humans is due to age,” he said.
It is the lack of investigations into the deaths in the country that has left the true extent of the virus unnoticed, he said.
The next challenge in Somalia is not only to get COVID-19 vaccines, but also to convince the population to accept them.
It will take time, ‘exactly the same as it cost our people to believe in the polio or measles vaccines,’ Bilaal said.
Hirabeh, responsible for the Somali virus response, agrees that ‘our people have little confidence in the vaccines’, saying that many Somalis hate the needles. He called for serious awareness campaigns to change plans.
The logistics of rolling out COVID-19 vaccines are another major concern. Hirabeh said Somalia expects the first vaccines in the first quarter of 2021, but he is concerned that the country has no way of handling a vaccine like the Pfizer one needed to be kept at a temperature of minus 70 degrees Celsius to become.
“One that can be kept between minus 10 and minus 20 can fit the Third World like our country,” he said.