Measures aiming to prevent #COVID19 like lockdowns, banning public transport & closing shops, can create unemployment, raise food prices and threaten livelihoods of already vulnerable people.
In Sierra Leone we were too slow to address the secondary impacts of #Ebola. We focussed on battling the disease itself but didn't do enough to protect the rest of the health care system.
In #SouthSudan approximately half of the population, over 6 million people, were already facing crisis levels of food insecurity in 2020 before #COVID19 began.
#SouthSudan has 190 doctors which is approximately 1 per 65,000 people in the population. About 1.5% of what WHO says a country needs. Unfortunately this number doesn’t magically increase with COVID19.
As with Ebola, the COVID19 pandemic is unprecedented, fast-moving and full of uncertainty. This requires strategic political leadership to be combined with robust technical expertise at every level of the response.
This is our most critical lesson. We learnt that when people were given the information and the means they created their own prevention strategies.
7. An over-militarised approach to enforcing prevention measures will backfire
In Sierra Leone, when the police & army were enforcing strict quarantine measures, people often fled the response, rather than engaging with it. People need to feel cared for.