The Roman military expert Vegetius said: “In time of peace, prepare for war.” The concept of preparedness for potential epidemics and pandemics has largely gone ignored by many authorities.
At the time of writing this, the Covid-19 infection case count was past 7.5 million and just short of half a million deaths. By comparison, the rate of infection vis-à-vis Sars and Mers, the more recent infectious disease outbreaks of this century, is like bushfire: The Covid-19 toll has eclipsed the tally of both Mers and Sars infections.
Now that we are in the throes of Covid-19, we should prepare our medical and public health systems for increasing numbers as well as the next pandemic.
To begin with, Kenya does not have an independent infectious diseases hospital, like nations such as the United States and Singapore, specialising in addressing prevention and treatment. The Singaporean case is of significant interest.
With a population of 5.6 million, compared to Kenya’s 51.4 million, Singapore has a National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID), a hospital mandated, funded and equipped for an infectious disease situation — the likes of which Covid-19 has created. Its health ministry has the NCID plugged right into the public health management framework.
A similar initiative could help Kenya to improve its management of infectious diseases. The funding for this, at the moment, would be appropriated from the Kenya Covid-19 Fund, which has not engaged in any infrastructural investment towards treatment and spread of infection.
Given that the resources and capacity are lacking, mobile infectious disease centres can be prioritised to bring treatment closer to the citizens as opposed to transporting patients long distances to hospital — an ill-equipped facility at that.
The hospital would be outfitted with negative pressure isolation wards, purposely built and designed to manage the airflow into and out of the patient containment unit to prevent the spread of infection.
This requires to be incorporated to a hospital’s ventilation systems to ensure that potentially contaminated air coming from the isolation pods where infected patients are enclosed does not find its way to other areas of the hospital or the atmosphere in general without having been filtered.
Several countries have implemented negative pressure isolation wards, which have been instrumental in curtailing the spread of infection to the medical practitioners who are a key asset in surmounting this medical avalanche arising from the pandemic. A situation of this magnitude gets dire quite fast when the specialist medical officers suffer harm and fatalities due to the infections they are fighting so hard.
The ravages of the Ebola virus outbreak in late 2013 prepared Liberia for Covid-19. Commencing screening of passengers earlier than most other countries, training doctors and nurses on the identification of symptoms and making provisions for treatment sites for suspected and confirmed cases has resulted in a lower Covid-19 caseload in Liberia as compared to Kenya.
Whereas there can be improvements in their implementation, if one looks hard enough, a sit-and-wait approach cannot be deemed a plan for a country to adopt. Just like the spinal injury and cancer centres, an infectious disease centre would boost our ammunition against pandemics.
Mr Njaramba is a final year microbiology and biotech student. [email protected]
