MOGADISU, Somalia (AP) – As richer countries struggle to distribute COVID-19 vaccines, Somalia remains the rare place where much of the population has not taken the coronavirus seriously. Some fear he turned out to be more deadly than anyone knows.
“Certainly, our people do not use any form of protection measures, no masks, no social distancing,” Abdirizak Yusuf Hirabeh, the government’s COVID-19 incident manager, said in an interview. “If you travel around the city (from Mogadishu) or nationally, no one talks about it.” And yet, infections grow, he said.
Places like Somalia, the Horn of Africa nation torn apart by three decades of conflict, will be the last to see COVID-19 vaccines in significant numbers. With part of the country still owned by al-Shabab’s al-Qaeda-linked extremist group, the risk of the virus becoming endemic in some hard-to-reach areas is strong – a fear for parts of Africa amid the slow arrival of vaccines.
“There is no real or practical investigation into this,” said Hirabeh, who is also the director of Mogadishu’s Martini Hospital, the largest patient treating COVID-19, which saw seven new patients on the day he spoken. He acknowledged that neither the facilities nor the equipment are adequate in Somalia to fight the virus.
Less than 27,000 virus tests have been performed in Somalia, a country of more than 15 million people, one of the lowest rates in the world. Less than 4,800 cases were confirmed, including at least 130 deaths.
Some worry that the virus will sink into the population like another poorly diagnosed but deadly fever.
For 45-year-old street beggar Hassan Mohamed Yusuf, fear has become a certainty. “At first I saw this virus as another form of flu,” he said.
Then, three of his young children died after coughing and high fever. As residents of a makeshift camp for people displaced by conflict or drought, they did not have access to coronavirus testing or proper care.
At the same time, Yusuf said, the virus hurt his efforts to find money to treat his family because “we can’t get close enough” to people to beg.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the Somali government tried some measures to limit the spread of the virus, closing all schools and closing all domestic and international flights. Mobile phones rang with messages about the virus.
But social distance has long disappeared from the country’s streets, markets or restaurants. On Thursday, about 30,000 people crowded into a stadium in Mogadishu for a regional football match without face masks or other anti-virus measures in sight.
Mosques in the Muslim nation have never faced restrictions for fear of backlash.
“Our religion taught us hundreds of years ago that we should wash our hands, faces and even feet five times a day, and our women should take the veils off their faces because they are often weaker. So this is the whole prevention of the disease, if it really exists, “said Abdulkadir Sheikh Mohamud, an imam in Mogadishu.
“We let Allah’s problem protect us,” said Ahmed Abdulle Ali, a store owner in the capital. He attributed the increase in coughing during the changing prayers of the seasons.
A more important protection factor is the relative youth of the people of Somalia, said Dr. Abdurahman Abdullahi Abdi Bilaal, who works in a clinic in the capital. Over 80% of the country’s population is under 30 years old.
“The virus is here, absolutely, but people’s resistance is due to age,” he said.
The lack of post-mortem investigations in the country is what allows the real extent of the virus to remain undetected, he said.
The next challenge in Somalia is not simply to obtain COVID-19 vaccines, but also to persuade the population to accept them.
This will take time, “just as what our people needed to believe in polio or measles vaccines,” said one Bilaal in question.
Hirabeh, responsible for the response to the Somali virus, agreed that “our people have little confidence in vaccines,” saying that many Somalis hate needles. He called for serious awareness campaigns to change his mind.
The logistics of any COVID-19 vaccine launch is another major concern. Hirabeh said Somalia is waiting for the first vaccines in the first quarter of 2021, but worries that the country cannot handle a vaccine like Pfizer that needs to be kept at a temperature of minus 70 degrees Celsius.
“One that could be kept between minus 10 and minus 20 would suit the third world as our country,” he said.