Nairobi, June 3 — As many as 30 million children’s lives are at risk from deadly diseases such as malaria, lack of immunization, or increased malnutrition, as health systems are overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report has warned.
Titled Covid-19 Aftershocks: Secondary impacts threatens Children’s lives than the disease itself, considers what would happen if the devastating secondary impacts of the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak on children were replicated in the 24 most fragile countries covered by the United Nation’s COVID-19 humanitarian appeal.
“Although key differences exists between the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and Covid-19, Ebola outbreak provides valuable insights into the secondary health impacts children can experience during an infectious disease outbreak where weak health systems are already stretched to their limit, people’s routines are disrupted, and fear takes hold,” says the report, authored by World Vision, a Christian humanitarian agency for children.
Of the UN’s 24 world’s poorest and most fragile countries with preexisting humanitarian plans, 14 are from the African continent. They include Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Libya, Ethiopia, DRC, Chad, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Burundi, and Burkina Faso.
While countries across the globe are required to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, those with existing crises are considered particularly vulnerable, and less equipped and able to do so.
According to the report, the very real secondary health impacts of COVID-19 in countries of fragility will reverberate through these communities and countries for years to come, compounding what are already extremely difficult situations and threatening to undermine progress made towards increasing health, wellbeing, and prosperity.
“The Ebola outbreak’s transmission rates were slightly different from the current COVID-19. We had not experienced a disease of pandemic levels in the recent years that were going to paralyze the entire world. Ebola was hence the closest we could reflect on in this report,” Joseph Kamara, World Vision East Africa Regional Director, and Emergency Affairs told Ubuntu Times in a zoom meeting interview.
As a result of the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone lost an estimated $2.2 billion of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) due to health costs, loss of lives, lower agricultural production, and reduced investments.
“The world is only beginning to understand the impacts of pandemics like COVID-19 on the least-developed countries as a whole and over the long term,” the report says.
Despite having established health systems, developed nations struggle to contain the COVID-19 pandemic as seen in high mortality rates, medical supply shortages, and overburdening of health care providers and facilities.
Countries identified in the UN’s global humanitarian response plan are prime examples of countries whose health systems were underprepared and underdeveloped prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Even if the children do not represent the high-risk group of COVID-19 fatality particularly, it is crystal clear that this pandemic has hidden risks to African children’s rights and well-being,” Eric Hazard, Director of Advocacy and Campaign for Africa at Save the Children, the British humanitarian organization for children told Ubuntu Times in an interview.
According to a recent World Health Organization (WHO) analysis of 182 Member States, 10 percent were not ready to respond to an infectious disease outbreak.
The report further warns that over 26 million children are at a greater risk of being exposed to potentially fatal diseases due to a 30 percent reduction in Diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP3) immunization coverage.
“More than five million additional children could suffer from malnutrition, including severe wasting, and 100,000 additional children could die from malaria,” the report warns.
The UN identifies children as a group of priority concern, highlighting their increased risk of experiencing shocks.
Surpassed only by pneumonia, diarrhea, and sepsis, malaria is the fourth highest killer of children under five.
In the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, says the report, the region saw a 50 percent reduction in access to healthcare services, leading to increased deaths from malaria by an average of 50.5 percent across Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
“Due to fear, outpatient visits to hospitals dropped to as low as 10 percent as people were afraid to visit healthcare facilities in case they caught the virus themselves. Similar fears are being seen with COVID-19,” the report says.
According to the UN children agency, UNICEF, malnutrition causes nearly half of all deaths in children under 5, either directly from acute forms or from increased vulnerability to infections and other illnesses.
And with the pandemic restricting access to nutritious food, children previously relying on school feeding programs no longer access the services, coupled with closed markets, limiting opportunities to buy or sell produce and other food items.
In Kenya, children have been out of school for three months due to COVID-19, but current heated debate pitting parents, education stakeholders, and the government on whether to reopen schools or not has created an environment of confusion.
Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha has been insisting that children will sit for national exams this year despite being out of school, adding that children were going on with learning through digital skills.
It is a statement that has left parents from disadvantaged economic backgrounds in dilemma as inequalities such as access to smartphones, a reliable internet, and television as well as radio sets exist.
“Not every child has access to online learning or through radio or take-home material. If those can be supplemented with going to school, at particular intervals or phases, that would work,” says Kamara.
He adds, “We have to come up with innovations that fit into our context. Our context is much different than the context in the western world where they have access to fast internet. We do not have the infrastructure to extend online learning, especially to rural children and urban poor.”
“The rapid spread of the pandemic has been clearly overburdening an under-resourced African system. We have managed to resist the pandemic from the sanitary point of view, but in another way, the system has been shifting as there has been a disruption hence the continent is likely to be in a scenario of an increase in incidences from preventable and treatable diseases,” says Hazard of Save the Children.