The World Health Organisation (WHO) has cautioned Zimbabwe against being distracted or relaxing due to the low number of confirmed coronavirus cases it has recorded to date.
WHO country representative Dr Alex Gasasira said Zimbabwe should rather intensify surveillance as COVID-19 was highly-infectious. He said:
Our recommendation at WHO is to continue intensifying surveillance. Let’s not be distracted by the numbers that are being confirmed or that are coming out negative.
We know that this is a very infectious disease, so as long as we have anybody who is confirmed, we should maintain very high vigilance. The fact that we haven’t got many cases yet is not any reason for us to reduce vigilance.
Dr Gasasira added that teams of experts are currently analysing the impact of the national lockdown imposed on the country since 30 March to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. He said:
We know from evidence done by modellers that lockdown reduces risk of transmission, and I know there are teams of experts currently looking at data from Zimbabwe, but our thinking at WHO is that this (lockdown) could have been a factor in Zimbabwe not having too many cases or a sharp rise in Covid-19 transmission.