Coronavirus: Grim April awaits if govt efforts don’t bear fruit
By the end of April the country might be grappling with 10,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus.
This is part of the grim statistics shared by Ministry of Health Director General Dr Patrick Amoth on Monday as he painted a gloomy picture of what awaits Kenyans if they don’t take measures instigated by the government seriously.
The numbers are infection projections done by the Ministry of Health to establish the expected number of persons who will be infected by Covid-19 going by the current infection rates.
During the daily briefing by the National Emergency Response Committee, Dr Amoth explained that although the virus has no particular trend, they expect a total of 1,000 cases to be confirmed by the first week of April and 5,000 cases by mid-April.
“We have done modelling to see the kind of numbers that we are going to have, As waziri has said this disease is not following any particular trend, however, our modelling puts us at having about 1000 cases by the first week of April. And we postulate that we will have 5,000 cases by mid-April and potentially 10,000 by end of April,” said Dr Amoth.
He added: “So those are the figures that we are working with in terms of how we preposition our personal protective equipment, test kits, human resource and quarantine and isolation facilities. Nature sometimes does not obey science but we believe that if it works along that way then the actions that we will take we will be able to be in control.”
Testing, he said, is currently being done to persons who have been quarantined for at least 8 days, considering the fact that the current available laboratories have the capacity to test only 300 samples within 24 hours.
“In terms of the testing we have agreed in consultation with our technical team that we are only going to test those who are on quarantine after the eighth day. Remember also the laboratory capacity that we have we can only be able to do 300 samples in 24 hours,” said Dr Amoth.
The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the country currently stands at 50 after eight more people tested positive on Monday.