• Over 61,100 COVID-19 cases and 2,200 deaths were reported in 53 African countries as on May 11, 2020.
• This economic cost of the lockdown was in addition to the wider external impact of the pandemic in Africa such as lower commodity prices and investment flows.

THE KEY ECONOMIC RISKS AS A RESULT OF THE LOCKDOWN INCLUDE:

• Drop in demand for products and services
• Lack of operational cash flow.
• Reduction of opportunities to meet new customers
• Closure of businesses.
• Decline in worker production and productivity from working at home
• Logistics and shipping of products
• Difficulties in obtaining supplies of raw materials essential for production

FOOD SECURITY THREATENED :

• About 70 per cent of slum dwellers surveyed by the UN agency in Kenya reported that they were missing meals or eating less.

THE UNECA RECOMMENDED:

• Improving testing;
• Following lockdown until preventive or curative medicines are developed;
• Contact tracing and mass testing;
• Immunity permits; gradual segmented reopening;
• Adaptive triggering and mitigation.

VULNERABILITY :

• UNECA said the lockdowns prevent severe vulnerabilities in the continent where only 1.8 hospital beds are available per 1,000 people.
• The risk of spread of the infection is also high since only 34 per cent of the population in Africa has access to household facilities for washing hands with soap and water.

SLOW AND SEGMENTED RE-OPENING

THE NEW NORMAL: 

• The ‘extra time’ afforded by the lockdowns must be utilised to rapidly put in place testing, treatment systems, preventive measures and carefully design lockdown exit strategies in collaboration with communities and vulnerable groups, the report suggested.

• A new kit — based on clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) technology — that tests for the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in an hour’s time and the results for which can be seen through the naked eye, is now available, at a time when an increase in the quantum of testing is highly sought after to combat the COVID-19 disease.
• The testing kit — developed by biotechnology firm Sherlock Biosciences — does not give false negative or false positive results and has high sensitivity and specificity, unlike Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and immunoassays tests.

PRINCIPLE:

• The genetic material from the Ribonucleic acid (RNA) of the virus does not need to be converted to Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), unlike RT-PCR based tests.
• This technology has so far been used to find genes along a strand of DNA, snip them out and replace them with alternative genes.

THE TEST HAS THREE STEPS: 

• STEP 1: Genetic material is extracted from the patients’ sample and is amplified using a commercially available polymerase amplification kit.(25 MINUTES)
• STEP 2 : The amplified viral sample is then incubated with and detected with Cas13 (an RNA editing technique), which takes 30 minutes.
• STEP 3 :A commercially available paper dipstick is then used to confirm the presence of the virus.This confirmation can be done through the naked eye. (2 MINUTES)