Nigeria among countries vulnerable to coronavirus outbreak - World Health Organisation (WHO) warns

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Besides Egypt, which already has a confirmed case of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), researchers and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have identified Algeria and South Africa as African countries most at risk while Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Angola, Tanzania, Ghana and Kenya as having moderate chance of importing the virus.

The researchers, in a study published in Nature, said they were most concerned about Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Angola, Tanzania, Ghana and Kenya because of their weak healthcare systems, low economic status and unstable political situation which make them highly vulnerable.

WHO Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had said the agency’s decision to declare the outbreak a global health emergency, was mainly based on concerns that the epidemic could spread in nations with fragile healthcare platforms.


For that reason, researchers are also worried about the disease spreading among people in Africa.

An epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, United States and a co-author of the Harvard team’s model, Marc Lipsitch, said though Africa was not as exposed to the ailment as those nations in South East Asia due to direct international flights from Wuhan.

But, he nonetheless feared that a large number of Chinese labourers on the continent and their travels between China and Africa were a possible route for transmission.

The analysis, posted on medRxiv, examined flights to Africa from Chinese cities that had reported infections, but it excluded towns in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, because of the lockdown that has restricted travels from many locations there since late January.