Heed PM’s warning on Covid-19 omicron wave

The debilitating new wave emerged apparently in Botswana and then spread around the world after it was isolated as a new variant in South Africa. Reports indicate that cases of infections were tripling and quadrupling within a week, after topping over two thousand cases the previous week. As the variant was almost immediately diagnosed in other parts of the world, its characteristics are now clearer.

For one thing, in South Africa a worrying aspect is that this variant is affecting scores of children under five years of age, which wasn’t the case even with the Delta variant, the most powerful before this new variant arose. And it isn’t that it is attacking a different age group but age groups on the whole do not matter so much anymore, so it is a long story from the time Covid-19 was a disease chiefly of aged people. That is why premier Majaliwa has been at pains to remind people that the pandemic is worsening.

As Tanzania has had a fairly good environment while other countries saw on a daily scale people dying in hundreds or thousands from the pandemic and for fairly long periods, here we have seen bouts of the pandemic, as if it was a fever. There was a moment, early this year when the Beta variant was spreading, that some wards in Kilimanjaro districts recorded more than a dozen burials in a single day. But those instances were few and far between, each ward having a bout of attacks or its kith and kin living in towns or cities being brought home for burial, and often in a restricted manner for fear of a wave of infections.

There are several characteristics that make Tanzania compare with South Africa but the contrasts are sharper, so to speak. We compare in the number of vaccinated adults as percentage of the adult population, where as a matter of fact they are well ahead of us, despite that by Western standards their vaccination rate is a disappointing third of all adults. Here the figure is much lower as we scarcely have two million people already vaccinated, but many are beginning to understand that escape routes are few.

When it comes to other lines of defence like wearing masks and using sanitisers, evidently South Africa is ahead of us in that aspect as people falling sick with the virus, and even acute hospitalization is more common. But as it was the case with the AIDS pandemic earlier, many people strongly believe in their immunity or assurance by some luck mechanism and take no precautions. This wave is harder to combat than previous variants of the coronavirus, but as Tanzania has never had a full pandemic many people are lukewarm on preventions; more care is needed here.