A trashed country

Boy, if a country as trashed and ruined as Nigeria can contain COVID-19, what the hell is Canada's problem?  Answer:  Theresa Tam and her merry band of (wo)men.  Tam and her colleagues keep saying, "We've never seen anything like this before."  Yes, and that's exactly the point.  That's what you are paid to plan for because a pandemic is always "something we've never seen before."

Doug Saunders had an interesting piece in 'The Globe and Mail' yesterday about how Nigeria is handling the crisis.  Obviously amazingly well.  Lagos alone has a population of 20 million and yet the government has managed to keep the disease under control by using strict quarantine measures that spring into place immediately when a case is suspected.

"When the virus escaped China in January, Nigeria and other sub-Saharan countries were able to respond faster and more decisively than the US or Britain.  The countries that have avoided big outbreaks are those that responded very quickly in January and February," writes Saunders.  "Some threw huge sums of money at the problem, but others like Nigeria used techniques learned from the Ebola crisis of quarantine, contact tracing, social isolation of those infected that Western countries spent long weeks monitoring."  How dumb.

Apparently, when the first COVID-19 victim arrived in Nigeria on Feb. 24th -- a man who had flown from Italy and spent two days near Lagos before testing positive -- officials knew what to do and who should do it.  He was immediately quarantined and officials sent to interview hundreds of people who might have been in contact with him and then tracked all of their contacts.  Within 48 hours, they had set up a coronavirus command centre to gather data from hundreds of offices reporting to public health emergency operations centres in 23 states.

I have to add that B's uncle, the late Keith Marley-Clarke, was the regimental commander of the British army in Nigeria in the early fifties and the same military precision and control that he helped establish then was put onto to place for this operation.  Never underestimate British military might.

Those centres in turn gathered and digitized the data using contact-tracing software that had been set up years earlier by the US Centres for Disease Prevention and Control (CDPC).  This information was made available to the public immediately to enable everyone to alter his/her activities accordingly.  This allowed Nigeria to not only tightly lock down entire cities where outbreaks had been detected, but also to relax rules when infections rated slowed.

This was possible because the CDPC used to have satellite centres all over the world, but Donald Trump closed them.  That is why the whole mess got completely out-of-control in other parts of the world.  "Nigeria may be a poor and badly-governed country, but what it has in abundance today is disease- fighting knowledge," writes Saunders.

We would have much less infection and death on our hands if we'd learned from Nigeria.  While police are busy here ticketing kids who ride a bike in a deserted park or throw a few hoops on an empty basket ball court, all I can say is, "Over to you, Dr. Tam."