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547COVID-19
and Africa: Does “One Size Fit All” in Public Health Intervention?
or total or partial lockdowns of cities, territories, and sub-national
regions. These measures are designed to slow the degree and rapidity
of spread in order to minimize morbidity and mortality and to avert
overwhelming fragile health infrastructures.
Because humans are super spreaders of COVID-19, self-isolation
and quarantine of suspected carriers and infected persons, respec-
tively, have also been mandated. Other measures include contact
tracing of infected persons, physical or social distancing12 in public
spaces, and promotion of time-tested basic hygiene through hand-
washing, other forms of hand sanitization, and disinfecting of sur-
faces in homes and workplaces.
These measures are part of received public health wisdom for
infectious disease control.13 However, the underlying assumptions for
their viability are often taken for granted, and their implementation in
African settings poses significant challenges. Among the core assump-
tions: that average citizens have access to credible information from
public health authorities, and access to basic amenities like running
water, electricity, functional accommodation, public transportation,
and personal identification details. However, Sub-Saharan Africa is
largely deficient in three core dimensions of the multidimensional
poverty index (MPI)—health, education, and standard of living—and
is also deficient in other specific MPI elements: nutrition, sanitation,
drinking water, electricity, housing, and assets.14
Effective implementation of COVID-19 pandemic awareness,
physical distancing, hand sanitation, and disinfection of surfaces are
implausible in the absence of the conditions that are basic assump-
tions underlying infectious disease control.15 In a multitude of African
contexts, the majority of people do not have reliable access to run-
ning water, live in crowded spaces (especially the vulnerable urban
and suburban slum populations), and are served by decrepit, over-
crowded, and poorly regulated public transportation. Buying and sell-
ing of goods is typically conducted in open-air community markets
12. Some jurisdictions prefer “physical distancing” to “social distancing” because of
the nuances in meaning of the latter and unintended connotations. For the most
part, the terms are used interchangeably.
13. See Dale Weston, Katherina Hauck & Richard Amlôt, “Infection Prevention
Behaviour and Infectious Disease Modelling: A Review of the Literature and
Recommendations for the Future” (2018) 18:1 BMC Public Health 336.
14. Ibid.
15. See Chidi Oguamanam, “Africa and COVID-19” (30 March 2020), online (blog):
OpenAIR <https://bit.ly/2xSXd6J>.
VULNERABLE
The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Title
- VULNERABLE
- Subtitle
- The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Authors
- Vanessa MacDonnell
- Jane Philpott
- Sophie Thériault
- Sridhar Venkatapuram
- Publisher
- Ottawa Press
- Date
- 2020
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 9780776636429
- Size
- 15.2 x 22.8 cm
- Pages
- 648
- Categories
- Coronavirus
- International