Intensify the fight against Covid-19

Finally, President Uhuru Kenyatta, in a deal struck with and endorsed by the Senate, has resolved the dispute around the allocation of revenue to the counties.

This involves the push for an additional Sh50 billion, bringing the total allocation to Sh366.5 billion for the financial Year 2021/22.

In the new plan, all the counties, some whose staff have gone without pay for months, will receive the same amounts of money they did in the previous financial year.

The said workers include healthcare providers who are the counties’ and country’s frontline soldiers in the war against Covid-19.

Sadly, just when the country was beginning to witness a drop in Covid-19 infection cases, and it looked like we were finally “flattening the curve”, it emerged that the two counties of Mombasa and Turkana were reporting a rise in the numbers of those infected with the virus.

Mombasa, for example, had, in under five days until Wednesday this week, recorded more than 101 new cases. And the Ministry of Health has dispatched teams to the two counties to monitor events.

The percentage of people who test positive for the novel coronavirus in the country now stands at 4.4, while the country’s recovery rate is at 63.8 per cent, as reported by the World Health Organisation’s regional office of Africa (WHO-Afro) to be below the regional average.

In its report, the agency says reduced contact tracing and the violation of public health measures, particularly by those using public transport, coupled with the reduction of resources at the county level to enable surveillance and for procurement of reagents and personal protective equipment (PPEs) pose a danger to the country.

Dr Eddy Odari Okoth, a virologist, points out that poverty and cultural beliefs deflect residents, especially at the coast, from seeking specialised healthcare services and observes that locals sometimes muddle up the symptoms associated with Covid-19 with those known to herald malaria, dengue fever and chikungunya.

Lately, images of top politicians mobbed by supporters at rallies where Covid-19 guidelines are trifled with have increasingly become cause for alarm. Many a Kenyans may not know that the 1918 Spanish Flu, which also brought grave illness to, among others, then King Alfonso XIII of Spain, infected close to half a billion people around the world, partly because of incautious resistance to prescribed safeguards. The flu killed an estimated 100 million people, with a spectacular devastation of Spain.

So just don't drop your guard yet. The war against Covid-19 is far from won, and still needs us all. The Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) aimed the following words at humankind for times like now: "Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within."

Mulang'o Baraza, Nairobi