It’s not confusing that Nigeria, in particular, has few cases. They have a really well-developed containment (disinfection + contact tracing + case isolation) infrastructure.
During the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic, an Ebola-positive patient showed up in Lagos, one of the most dense cities on the planet, and yet the country only ended up with 20 cases total.
My understanding (can’t seem to find a great citation for this, learned it from a CDC person at a conference) is that Nigeria’s internationally-funded efforts to eradicate polio (no wild polio since 2016!) helped to build world-leading containment expertise. The fact that Nigeria was able to contain Ebola was cited as an example of why international aid to fund healthcare infrastructure is worthwhile.
Anyway, people have been talking about how many Southeast Asian countries have been well-prepared for COVID-19 because of all of the institutional knowledge developed during the 2003 SARS outbreaks. We should expect many West African countries to have similar infrastructure from the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic- here’s a QZ Interview with Chikwe Ihekweazu, an African epidemiologist who sits on the board of the Public Health Foundation of Nigeria suggesting just that.
It’s not confusing that Nigeria, in particular, has few cases. They have a really well-developed containment (disinfection + contact tracing + case isolation) infrastructure.
During the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic, an Ebola-positive patient showed up in Lagos, one of the most dense cities on the planet, and yet the country only ended up with 20 cases total.
My understanding (can’t seem to find a great citation for this, learned it from a CDC person at a conference) is that Nigeria’s internationally-funded efforts to eradicate polio (no wild polio since 2016!) helped to build world-leading containment expertise. The fact that Nigeria was able to contain Ebola was cited as an example of why international aid to fund healthcare infrastructure is worthwhile.
For more background, here’s Ebola in Nigeria on Wikipedia, and a Scientific American article called How Did Nigeria Quash Its Ebola Outbreak So Quickly?
Anyway, people have been talking about how many Southeast Asian countries have been well-prepared for COVID-19 because of all of the institutional knowledge developed during the 2003 SARS outbreaks. We should expect many West African countries to have similar infrastructure from the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic- here’s a QZ Interview with Chikwe Ihekweazu, an African epidemiologist who sits on the board of the Public Health Foundation of Nigeria suggesting just that.