The hours of the day of Dr. John Nkengasong (Douala, Cameroon, 61 years old) are stretched to reach everything.
The co-director of the African Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) goes from one virtual meeting to another updating in his memory the latest data and trends of the coronavirus in Africa.
He does not hide his satisfaction at the low incidence of the virus on the continent [34,777 deaths and 1,445,535 infected, with figures from this Friday] but he is cautious: “You cannot talk about covid-19 with past tenses.
We are facing a very dangerous virus ”.
Since January, his main concern has been to win the battle against the pandemic working as a bloc: "The only way to be less vulnerable is to collaborate and coordinate as a continent, not as individual countries," he explains from Adís Adeba, Ethiopia, in the 15 minutes you have between conferences and meetings.
His ambition and joint vision was recognized last week by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who awarded him the Global Goalkeeper 2020 award for being "one of many heroes during the pandemic."
Question.
Why is it so influencing collaboration between African nations?
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Answer.
We all know now that this is a fast moving and easily spreading virus.
We know it is a threat.
If there is any trace of the coronavirus anywhere, it will become a threat to the entire country.
It makes us all vulnerable.
So we realized that the best way to attack him was to connect.
Now we communicate better, we coordinate better and we collaborate better.
This is central to fighting a pandemic.
Q.
What exactly are you working on together?
R.
The main one is a common strategy that is coordinated by the governments, specifically that of [Cyril] Ramaphosa - the president of South Africa - from his position as leader of the African Union.
The second strongest is the working group that includes specialists from all over the continent and meets us weekly.
Every Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. we get together to draw up new strategies and adapt them taking into account their evolution.
In fact, we have now created a common platform that works like Amazon or Alibaba, where you can get all the equipment and machinery to fight covid-19.
This platform is the example of camaraderie in the private sector.
The purpose is to expand the diagnostic capacity.
Q.
Is this union the one behind the low figures on the continent?
R.
Eight months later, we can firmly affirm that the measures we took so quickly slowed the spread of the virus.
There were countries in Africa that were confined with just two or three cases of Covid-19.
Others were even confined twice.
If we hadn't, we would have millions of cases today.
Thanks to our quick reaction, we save time to implement public health measures.
At the beginning we did not have the capacity to do many tests and we are still short.
We should make about 12 million a month, but at least we have managed to accumulate more than 14 million tests.
We have known how to react.
Q.
At the Global Goalkeepers 2020 awards ceremony, you talked about the importance of guaranteeing access to vaccines.
Is the Covax initiative enough [a coalition of 172 countries to guarantee the supply of vaccines to the poorest countries]?
A.
All our eyes are on this.
We trust the Covax mechanism and we want it to prosper but we are also exploring other avenues such as direct contracting and negotiating with pharmaceutical companies to achieve our goal, which is to immunize 60% of the African population.
What Covax provides us is 220 million doses of vaccines and that is 20% of the population.
We are working on that difference.
If we only vaccinate health workers and the spread continues, the virus would end up again disrupting the economy, people's mobility and their social life.
John Nkengasong.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Q.
Is South Africa an exception in the successful handling of the pandemic?
It has more than 600,000 accumulated cases, almost half that in all of Africa ...
A.
Not at all.
We should see in South Africa a success story.
It is a country of 60 million people.
And I assure you that if it were not for the measures taken, there would be between two and three million infections.
There the first cases were detected and shortly after the rapid increase in cases.
So they stopped everything.
But you can't stop a country's economy forever.
It was then that there was a rebound in cases and another lockdown occurred.
And in recent weeks it is undergoing one of the most brutal declines.
That is what we should be paying attention to.
Not to the number of cases, if not to the measures that currently have and the trend.
And these data show very good public health policies.
Q.
Are you preparing for a possible health collapse or is it a scenario you are not contemplating?
R.
The real problem is that, although our coronavirus cases are not as high as we imagined, they block other programs against tuberculosis, AIDS or malaria.
It is a problem that we are going to suffer and that we cannot stop addressing.
The tendency is to think that "only" we have 34,000 dead while the world accumulates a million.
But that is not how we should see it.
AIDS will kill 500,000 more people, tuberculosis another 500,000 and malaria about 400,000.
From the coronavirus there will be many more related deaths from other diseases.
Right now it's overshadowing everything else and you have to start taking these deaths into account as well.
What is clear is that we cannot trust ourselves or write the history of covid in Africa in the past.
It will condition the future.
It is a very dangerous virus, with very radical tendencies.
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