What would Africa's strategy be in dealing with the COVID virus?

The novel coronavirus has not yet been appropriately mapped and or reported in Africa.

Africa has a young population, and younger people who contract the disease according to the scientific speculation Africa will coop relatively well.

However, Africa health-care systems are one of the weakest and will, for sure, not be able to handle a widespread outbreak. Poor households are often some distance from government health facilities, and members of these households typically face long journeys and high opportunity costs to obtain health care.

All the public information and all relevant studies and the latest Ebola and measles outbreak studies indicate that the system is a very vulnerable and potential catastrophe on the horizon. The most wealthy nations could not keep up with COVID so how Least Developed Nations will deal with it?

According to the World Bank data on Current health expenditure (% GDP) – 2016 is averaging 6% so compared to developed nations who could not coop with the outbreak like Germany, France, Italy, etc.… with an average of 0.5 beds per 1,000 people.

Moreover, we do not have much accurate data on how many people there have serious health issues—tuberculosis, malnutrition or acute malnutrition, Cardiovascular disease—that make them the most vulnerable to other illnesses.

Social or what now the people are referring to as physical distancing will be challenging to establish, particularly in poor populations that need daily income to survive.

Not to forget, the economic slowdown that will trigger revenue declines for small businesses, job losses, and reduced wages as companies lay off workers, and workers operating in the informal economy lose income as well as those in the tourism industry.

The likely impact on the agricultural sector is more complicated. The pandemic will disrupt food supply chains, trade and exports This will have a major impact on the global food security system. During the last Ebola outbreak, rice prices increased by more than 25% especially in the high impacted countries (Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone).

If the shutdown of the border will be activated by states we will face a global word shortage of food supply. However, if borders remain open and trade continues to flow reasonably well, countries in Africa could hold up better than economies in other parts of the world since the demand for agriculture products across the globe would remain high.

In my opinion, the regional economic blocks ECOWAS, SADIC, IGAD, ECAAS, EAC should trigger regional task forces so they can have one unified centralized strategy that can help deal with the outbreak and to pool the needed resources to mitigate the social, financial and health impact.