mzeiya
Elder Lister
I like the reasoning of this guy based on Science and data. Very insightful. Check him out pale Mukuru Kwa Zukabaga
_______________________
So when we are look at covid19 situation , it makes for a nail biting analysis situation.
Sometimes before June I strongly advocated for reopening of schools in a phased manner and removing the restrictions of movement across the country. My reasons were based on science, restrictions of movement don't work as long as those areas were already infected and to make matters worse they ruin the economy. As for schools it was shown by some studies in Germany kids don't show symptoms and rarely infect others. The major headache was infection among teachers.
I predicted a major factor in the rise of cases was the cold season. The cold season makes people congregate in close quarters providing fuel and fire for covid disease to spread among family members , workers and colleagues. So my prediction was July and August will be peak months and September should see a sharp decline in cases as Temperatures warm up across the country significantly.
I also made a disclaimer we will not know the level of coronovirus infection as our testing is nothing to write home about, it's very pathetic and is not helping us to end the disease completely. You see the only way to end a pandemic completely is testing, isolation and contact tracing. When you do it 100% you completely eliminate the disease, china ,Taiwan , new Zealand and south Korea had at one time completely eliminated the disease only for them to suffer reinfection. Next door Uganda has come very close to total disease elimination only for it to suffer reinfection from South Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania.
So the data for Kenya is allover and is not clean at all but the data can be normalized to make head and tail and predict scientifically the likely evolution of the disease.
First and foremost, we can only know the disease prevalence by number of deaths, the deaths can also be underreported, so historical analytic tools will need to be employed, as for the daily cases they are all over but you can compare and contrast with other countries with accurate data but if you compare our data vis a vis Ghana you can see we have three to four times more cases than reported, in short death rate in Africa ranges from 0.5%-1% so if you look at the deaths reported they are 100 to 200 times the total infection.
So looking deeper in to the publicly available data , the most deaths we recorded were less than fifteen in the first week of August , so our daily cases peaked at between 1000 to 3000 daily cases. Right now with about 5 deaths our daily cases are between 500-1000 cases. This is after renormalizing the data.
So what do we expect going forward, first mandatory mask mandate should continue, overcrowded places should be a no no. Political rallies , large crusade or packed churches should be avoided. Physical distancing should be observed at all times. If you peak outside your window righlt now bright sunshine heralds the end of the bitterly cold season here in Kenya. The future is looking bright. We expect the covid19 infection to fall very low but never reach zero because we don't have watertight testing, contact tracing and isolation. Even in December and January we will be recording daily cases and occasional deaths.
So many people looking at the evolution of this crisis are saying the there was never really a pandemic here in Kenya and the government was interested in eating donor money and right now the government is announcing data that flattens the curve. This is simplistic. The government fumbled the pandemic control big Time, if the government had deployed water tight control methods of top notch testing , contract tracing and Isolation, the disease would have ended in may but they fumbled big time, to make matters worse, senior MoH officials saw an opportunity for rent seeking and carted away covid19 funds and lined their pockets. The extra 30,000 cases recorded in June , July and August are directly attributed to the theft of covid 19 funds, the extra 400 deaths are also a direct result of this mismanagement. Research and practice had shown that establishing tight guidelines like wearing masks, avoiding large gatherings and maintaining physical distancing slows down the pandemic spread in a big way. Testing and isolating confirmed cases and contact tracing always ended the infection. It was actually possible to end the Pandemic in may.
The government after realizing that the pandemic will not end soon removed movement restrictions out of Nairobi and relaxed the curfew. The government will soon realize that we can have low level infection of 50-100 people daily for the next two years and cant continue closing schools indefinitely. So the call on the government is to reopen schools begining in September. If you have eaten school fees. I am very sorry. Schools will definitely reopen in September. Nothing much will happen after they reopen, nothing much has happened after people were allowed to leave Nairobi.
So ending covid19 pandemic in Kenya clinically is a toll order , we lack the finese to carry out such a delicate surgical task absent of a vaccine.
_______________________
So when we are look at covid19 situation , it makes for a nail biting analysis situation.
Sometimes before June I strongly advocated for reopening of schools in a phased manner and removing the restrictions of movement across the country. My reasons were based on science, restrictions of movement don't work as long as those areas were already infected and to make matters worse they ruin the economy. As for schools it was shown by some studies in Germany kids don't show symptoms and rarely infect others. The major headache was infection among teachers.
I predicted a major factor in the rise of cases was the cold season. The cold season makes people congregate in close quarters providing fuel and fire for covid disease to spread among family members , workers and colleagues. So my prediction was July and August will be peak months and September should see a sharp decline in cases as Temperatures warm up across the country significantly.
I also made a disclaimer we will not know the level of coronovirus infection as our testing is nothing to write home about, it's very pathetic and is not helping us to end the disease completely. You see the only way to end a pandemic completely is testing, isolation and contact tracing. When you do it 100% you completely eliminate the disease, china ,Taiwan , new Zealand and south Korea had at one time completely eliminated the disease only for them to suffer reinfection. Next door Uganda has come very close to total disease elimination only for it to suffer reinfection from South Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania.
So the data for Kenya is allover and is not clean at all but the data can be normalized to make head and tail and predict scientifically the likely evolution of the disease.
First and foremost, we can only know the disease prevalence by number of deaths, the deaths can also be underreported, so historical analytic tools will need to be employed, as for the daily cases they are all over but you can compare and contrast with other countries with accurate data but if you compare our data vis a vis Ghana you can see we have three to four times more cases than reported, in short death rate in Africa ranges from 0.5%-1% so if you look at the deaths reported they are 100 to 200 times the total infection.
So looking deeper in to the publicly available data , the most deaths we recorded were less than fifteen in the first week of August , so our daily cases peaked at between 1000 to 3000 daily cases. Right now with about 5 deaths our daily cases are between 500-1000 cases. This is after renormalizing the data.
So what do we expect going forward, first mandatory mask mandate should continue, overcrowded places should be a no no. Political rallies , large crusade or packed churches should be avoided. Physical distancing should be observed at all times. If you peak outside your window righlt now bright sunshine heralds the end of the bitterly cold season here in Kenya. The future is looking bright. We expect the covid19 infection to fall very low but never reach zero because we don't have watertight testing, contact tracing and isolation. Even in December and January we will be recording daily cases and occasional deaths.
So many people looking at the evolution of this crisis are saying the there was never really a pandemic here in Kenya and the government was interested in eating donor money and right now the government is announcing data that flattens the curve. This is simplistic. The government fumbled the pandemic control big Time, if the government had deployed water tight control methods of top notch testing , contract tracing and Isolation, the disease would have ended in may but they fumbled big time, to make matters worse, senior MoH officials saw an opportunity for rent seeking and carted away covid19 funds and lined their pockets. The extra 30,000 cases recorded in June , July and August are directly attributed to the theft of covid 19 funds, the extra 400 deaths are also a direct result of this mismanagement. Research and practice had shown that establishing tight guidelines like wearing masks, avoiding large gatherings and maintaining physical distancing slows down the pandemic spread in a big way. Testing and isolating confirmed cases and contact tracing always ended the infection. It was actually possible to end the Pandemic in may.
The government after realizing that the pandemic will not end soon removed movement restrictions out of Nairobi and relaxed the curfew. The government will soon realize that we can have low level infection of 50-100 people daily for the next two years and cant continue closing schools indefinitely. So the call on the government is to reopen schools begining in September. If you have eaten school fees. I am very sorry. Schools will definitely reopen in September. Nothing much will happen after they reopen, nothing much has happened after people were allowed to leave Nairobi.
So ending covid19 pandemic in Kenya clinically is a toll order , we lack the finese to carry out such a delicate surgical task absent of a vaccine.