(Newser)
– While the wealthiest countries rush to distribute 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 measure, neither masks nor social distance,” said Abdirizak Yusuf Hirabeh, the government’s incident manager at COVID-19 in Mogadishu. “If you move around town or country, nobody talks about it.” However, infections are on the rise, he said. They are places like Somalia, the Horn of Africa nation torn by three decades of conflict, which will be the last to see COVID-19 vaccines in any significant quantity, reports the AP. With part of the country still under the control of the al-Shabab extremist group, linked to Al Qaeda, the risk of the virus becoming endemic in hard-to-reach areas is strong – a fear for parts of Africa. And getting people to accept vaccines will take time, “exactly the same thing that made our people believe in polio or measles vaccines,” said a doctor.
Neither facilities nor equipment are adequate in Somalia to fight the virus, Hirabeh acknowledged. Less than 27,000 coronavirus tests have been performed in the nation of 15 million, 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 Hassan Mohamed Yusuf, 45, a street beggar, 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 her children died after developing a cough and a high fever. As residents of a makeshift camp for displaced people, they had no access to tests or care. And the virus has hampered his efforts to find money to treat his family, Yusuf said: “We can’t get close enough” to people begging. Early on, the government took action, closing schools and stopping flights. But social distance has disappeared in public spaces. On Thursday, some 30,000 people flocked to a Mogadishu stadium for a football match without face masks or other anti-virus measures in sight.
(Read more stories from Somalia.)