MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) – While the wealthiest countries rush to distribute the COVID-19 vaccines, Somalia remains the rare place where a large part of the population does not take coronavirus seriously. Some fear they are more deadly than anyone imagines.
“Certainly our people do not use any form of protective measures, nor masks, nor social distance,” said Abdirizak Yusuf Hirabeh, the government’s COVID-19 incident manager, in an interview. “If you move around the city (Mogadishu) or across the country, nobody talks about it.” And yet infections are on the rise, he said.
They are places like Somalia, the Horn of Africa nation torn apart by three decades of conflict, which will be the last to see COVID-19 vaccines in any significant amount. With part of the country still under the control of the al-Qaeda-linked extremist group Al-Shabab, the risk of the virus becoming endemic in some hard-to-reach areas is strong – a fear for parts of Africa amid the slow arrival of vaccines.
“There is no real or practical investigation into the matter,” said Hirabeh, who is also director of the Martini hospital in Mogadishu, the largest patient at COVID-19, which saw seven new patients the day he spoke. He acknowledged that neither the facilities nor the equipment is adequate in Somalia to fight the virus.
Less than 27,000 tests for the virus have been carried out in Somalia, a country with more than 15 million inhabitants, one of the lowest rates in the world. Less than 4,800 cases have been confirmed, including at least 130 deaths.
Some fear the virus will spread to the population as yet another misdiagnosed, but deadly, fever.
For street beggar Hassan Mohamed Yusuf, 45, this fear has become almost a certainty. “In the beginning, we saw this virus as just another form of flu,” he said.
Then, three of his children died after coughing and a high fever. As residents of a makeshift camp for people displaced by conflict or drought, they lacked access to coronavirus testing or proper care.
At the same time, said Yusuf, the virus has hampered his efforts to find money to treat his family, as “we can’t get close enough” to people to beg.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the Somali government tried to take measures to limit the spread of the virus, closing all schools and shutting down all domestic and international flights. Cell phones rang with messages about the virus.
But social distance has long since disappeared in the country’s streets, markets or restaurants. On Thursday, some 30,000 people flocked to a stadium in Mogadishu for a regional football match without face masks or other anti-virus measures in sight.
Mosques in the Muslim nation have never faced restrictions, for fear of reactions.
“Our religion taught us hundreds of years ago that we should wash our hands, faces and even legs five times a day and our women should wear facial veils, as they are usually weaker. So this is all about preventing the disease, if it really exists, ”said Abdulkadir Sheikh Mohamud, an imam in Mogadishu.
“I left it up to Allah to protect us,” said Ahmed Abdulle Ali, a store owner in the capital. He attributed the increase in coughing during prayers to changing seasons.
A more important protective factor is the relative youth of the people of Somalia, said Dr. Abdurahman Abdullahi Abdi Bilaal, who works at a clinic in the capital. More than 80% of the country’s population is under 30 years old.
“The virus is here, to be sure, but people’s resilience is due to age,” he said.
It is the lack of post-mortem investigations in the country that is allowing the true extent of the virus to go undetected, he said.
The next challenge in Somalia is not simply to obtain the COVID-19 vaccines, but also to persuade the population to accept them.
This will take time, “just as our people took to believe in polio or measles vaccines,” said one concerned Bilaal.
Hirabeh, in charge of responding to the Somali virus, agreed that “our people have little confidence in vaccines”, saying that many Somalis hate needles. He called for serious awareness campaigns to change minds.
The logistics of any COVID-19 vaccine deployment is another major concern. Hirabeh said that Somalia expects the first vaccines in the first quarter of 2021, but fears that the country will not be able to deal with a vaccine like Pfizer’s, which requires it to be kept at a temperature of minus 70 degrees Celsius.
“One that could be kept between minus 10 and minus 20 can serve the Third World as our country,” he said.