MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th August, 2020) The World Health Organization (WHO) will increase the scope of support to 11 African countries experiencing a surge in new coronavirus cases and deaths, with the emphasis on reinforcing the testing capacity in non-central locations, WHO Africa said in a statement on Thursday.
"WHO is increasing support to 11 countries which have requested assistance as they experience a surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths," the organization said.
According to the statement, this includes mobilizing more technical experts on the ground, scaling up training to build up local capacity, particularly at the provincial and district level, community engagement and health education and providing direct material support to strengthen testing capacity.
Additionally, 1.1 million testing kits will be delivered atop the 1.8 million testing kits deployed to 47 African countries under the WHO-led global procurement consortium, the statement read.
WHO Regional Director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti said, as quoted in the statement, that testing must be "decentralized from the capital cities," as more and more cases are beginning to emerge in the hinterlands.
�The WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11. While Africa as a region is currently the world's second least affected to the Western Pacific, separate African countries have shown disproportionately high scores of COVID-19 cases and deaths. The latest WHO figures suggest that 10 African countries alone have accounted for 89 percent of all new cases in the past two weeks.
The outbreak in South Africa, for example, has grown to fall among the world's five largest ones, with over 521,000 confirmed cases and nearly 9,000 death.
