◼ COVID-19 / GOVERNMENT Bloomberg Businessweek March 16, 2020With 60% of Africans under 25, the disease may
not be as deadly there as it is in European or Asian
countries with older populations. Unlike in the West,
with its nursing homes, the elderly in Africa usu-
ally stay with their families, reducing clusters of vul-
nerable people. And Ebola may have given Africa a
better sense of how to deal with outbreaks. As the
disease—far more virulent than coronavirus, but
less communicable—spread across Africa in 2014,
Nigeria avoided an epidemic by tracking and isolat-
ing potential cases. “The structures and emergency
response strategies that worked well for Ebola are
being reactivated,” says Niniola Williams, head of a
nonprofit that battles infectious diseases in Nigeria.
Chikwe Ihekweazu, who leads Nigeria’s Centerfor Disease Control, is overseeing the country’s
response. In February the German-trained epidemi-
ologist joined a WHO mission on a visit to Wuhan,
the epicenter of the outbreak in China. Since his
return two weeks ago, he’s been in voluntary iso-
lation, working from a cramped studio at his home
in an upscale neighborhood in Abuja. While places
such as the university hospital, with clean wards dat-
ing from the 1980s oil bonanza, are preparing, he
says Nigeria is ill-equipped for an outbreak. Clinics
in smaller cities and the countryside lack every-
thing from bandages to beds to physicians, and he
has a staff of just 250, with five laboratories to test
new infections in a country of 200 million. The U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by con-
trast, has 11,000 employees and hundreds of labs.
Ihekweazu fears the prevalence of malaria in
Africa could make it hard to trace cases, as the ail-
ments’ early symptoms are similar, and the wide-
spread incidence of HIV has left many vulnerable
to Covid-19. “It’s a challenge around diagnoses, a
challenge around care,” he says, hunkered in his
home office, as two assistants work at the table in
the adjacent dining room. “My nightmare scenario
is a situation like Italy, in which significant trans-
mission has already started by the time you have a
chance to control it.” �Alonso Soto and James Paton▼ Built for trauma
patients, the facility is
being repurposed for a
virus outbreak◀ The coronavirus
ward at Abuja Teaching
Hospital is under
constructionPHOTOGRAPHS BY ETINOSA YVONNE FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK