Egypt, Algeria and Republic of South Africa are the African countries most at risk for coronavirus COVID-19 importation in the continent, due to high air traffic with the contaminated Chinese provinces. But these countries are also among the best equipped on the continent to quickly detect and deal with new cases.

Image/Faigl.ladislav

In other African countries, the risk of importation is lower, but health organization deficiencies raise concerns about rapid spread. This modeling work carried out by Vittoria Colizza, Inserm research director, and her team from Unit 1136 Pierre Louis Institute of epidemiology and public health (Inserm / Sorbonne University), in collaboration with the Université libre de Bruxelles, the Oxford Martin Programme on Pandemic Genomics and the University of California Los Angeles, is published in The Lancet.

The COVID-19 coronavirus continues to spread in China and cases have been reported in more than 25 countries. The African continent was spared for a long time until a first case was recently reported in Egypt. Vittoria Colizza, research director at Inserm (French Institute for Health and Medical Research), and her team from Unit 1136 Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health (Inserm / Sorbonne University), in collaboration with the Université libre de Bruxelles, the Oxford Martin Programme on Pandemic Genomics and the University of California Los Angeles, assessed the risk of importing the virus into Africa, country by country, and the capacities of each of them to detect and deal with it.

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