COVID-19 Response in Africa bulletin: Situation and Response in the WHO AFRO Region (Issue 12, November 2023) – World

“It is therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency…. The worst thing any country could do now is to use this news as a reason to let down its guard, to dismantle the systems it has built, or to send the message to its people that COVID-19 is nothing to worry about. This virus is here to stay.
It is killing, and it is still changing. The risk remains of new variants emerging that cause new surges in cases and deaths”,said the Director-General as he lifted the public health emergency of international concern status on 5 May 2023.

Indeed, while the world is recovering from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are still observing new cases, albeit with a steady decline. I am happy to report that there is currently no country in our Region that is in a situation of concern. As our Region recovers, it is also faced with new threats such as Ebola, cholera, diphtheria, and several humanitarian crises that continue to challenge our fragile health systems.

We are transitioning from responding to COVID-19 as an emergency to its long-term management alongside other infectious diseases. Let us apply the science and lessons we have learnt from the pandemic to guide the transition and as a knowledge base for managing public health threats in the future. In this regard, WHO AFRO commissioned the documentation of WHO’sresponse to the COVID-19 pandemic in the African Region. A total of 18 countries participated in the exercise. We shall share the findings in the next issue of the bulletin.
Additionally, we released the WHO AFRO COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan 2023–2025 in May, to guide the transition process in Member States.

Countries are at different stages of the transition and in this issue, we share some success stories from our Member States. We also highlight the “shadow pandemic” of long COVID-19 that many people are grappling with, with little support from our health care systems. Current data estimates the prevalence of long COVID19 to be around 43%, globally. This is likely to increase pressure on health systems, with immense implications for quality of life and other social and economic services. We have very little information on this condition in our Region. Investment in more research and developing effective and widely available rehabilitation programmes are desperately needed. I call upon ministries of health, in partnership with research and academic institutions, to conduct research on this condition to establish its magnitude in the Region, including its presentation and risk factors, in order to guide its management.

We continue to monitor the Region’s performance through the transition using 16 key performance indicators and I invite you to look at the performance of your individual countries.

In concluding, I encourage our Member States to guard against complacency during this period as we may experience other waves because the SARS-COV-2 virus continues to evolve, producing new variants whose transmissibility and virulence are unpredictable. I thank all the health workers in the Region who are dedicated to ending the pandemic at all costs.