‘Take the two African countries I have called home – Senegal and Ghana... Senegal is in a good position because its Covid-19 response planning began in earnest in January, as soon as the first international alert on the virus went out... As a result, this nation of 16 million people has had only 30 deaths... Ghana, with a population of 30 million, has a similar death toll to Senegal, partly because of an extensive system of contact tracing, utilising a large number of community health workers and volunteers, and other innovative techniques such as “pool testing”, in which multiple blood samples are tested and then followed up as individual tests only if a positive result is found. The advantages in this approach are now being studied by the World Health Organization.’
Read here (The Guardian, May 21, 2020)
