Travelers run to villages ahead of inter-district transport lock on Thursday. Experts say this is likely to spread COVID-19 to other places yet the intervention was meant to interrupt transmission.
Public health experts have raised concern over the new restrictions limiting inter-district travel, closing schools, weekly markets and prayer places to interrupt a COVID-19 infection surge that has had up to a thousand people testing positive daily in the previous few days.
The measures that were announced last evening by President Yoweri Museveni will be in force for the next 42days. He also warned that a total lockdown could be considered if no major drop in infections are registered.
But the experts are saying that the restrictions are likely to have dire effects especially that the country hasn’t fully recovered from the collateral damage suffered as a result of the initial total lockdown that didn’t only cripple the economy but left sections with mental distress and death.
Dr Aloysious Ssennyonjo, a Public Health Expert who is based at the Makerere University School of Public Health told URN on Monday that the restrictions issued last evening have loopholes yet ways of addressing them are not clear.
He said locking is not a one-size-fits-all solution for the pandemic. He says for instance, that even as there have been huge numbers of positives being announced lately, over 90 per cent of these have been coming from the Kampala metropolitan area yet no specific measures or concerted efforts have been focused on these high infection areas to study the trend the virus is taking.
Ssennyonjo’s view collates with a revelation by UVRI’s Prof. Pontiano Kaleebu that they are currently unaware of the exact strains circulating in Kampala since no data has been generated yet about the hot spot.
Yesterday alone, of the 1,256 cases that tested positive, 825 were picked from Kampala followed by Wakiso district that had 171 cases. On Saturday, results indicated 670 people tested positive with 513 coming from Kampala and yet a day before on Friday, of the 1,083 positive cases countrywide, 832 came from samples picked from Kampala followed by 101 from the neighbouring Wakiso district.
Dr Joseph Matovu, a Behavioral Scientist and Researcher says that away from the structural interventions that carry a huge toll, the government ought to have developed a message that is believable by the public to be able to influence a change in perception.
Matovu says he is baffled that the Ministry still runs messages that focus on priority groups and yet scientifically at this time of the pandemic in the second wave groups no longer matter since there’s wide community transmission.
He says with these new measures imposed he says we may see a slight change in infection figures because people fear being reprimanded but it won’t be long before new complacency sets in because no direct investment has been put into changing perception.
Both experts warn the public about the worse, especially that the president hasn’t announced how effectively some measures are to be enforced and what interventions will absorb the shock the lockdown is likely to cause. They warn that the partial lockdown could help but might also be disastrous and recommend confidence-building in the people for them to follow the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
-URN
