Guinea-Bissau relies on international solidarity to combat the COVID-19 pandemic

Guinea-Bissau has so far recorded eight cases of Covid-19. On March 26, the authorities decreed a state of emergency that gives legal framework to the measures that had already been taken before: suspension of all academic and religious activities, sports competitions and all activities that involve concentration of people, including funerals, closure of borders and restrictions on the movement of people and trade.

31 Mar 2020

Guinea-Bissau relies on international solidarity to combat the COVID-19 pandemic

The Ministry of Health has already adopted a National Response Plan, which costs around US $ 13 million and which is supported by WHO, the UN system in general and other international partners. On March 27, after a meeting, the Group of partners known as P5 - ECOWAS, CPLP, AU, EU and UN - decided, “for reasons of humanitarian need and to combat the spread of the virus, ask the Resident Coordinator of the United Nations System, the WHO Representative and the World Bank Representative, to be the focal point of the international community, to interact quickly with the country and, in particular, with the Interministerial Commission created for this purpose, in order to operationalize the approved action plan, accompanied by an adequate financing model for mobilizing resources between the different partners. ”, reads the partners communique.

The national plan includes the restoration of a building for the isolation of patients at the National Hospital Simao Mendes, already concluded by the armed forces engineering division, awareness campaigns, acquisition of equipment and medicines, among others. Meanwhile, 20,000 kits for testing COVID and protective equipment for doctors and nurses have arrived in Guinea-Bissau, thanks to the support of the World Food Program.

The first cases of COVID-19 - an infection with a virus called the coronavirus, similar to the flu - were recorded in China in November 2019. On March 11, 2020, WHO declared COVID a pandemic due to the speed and geographical spread. The cases of the new coronavirus add up to more than 700 thousand worldwide, and the death toll has already exceeded 30 thousand.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared on Monday that the Covid-19 pandemic is "the biggest global health crisis of our time" and called for tests to be carried out on all suspected cases.

Tedro Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO, appealed at a press conference in Geneva on March 16 to solidarity for all: "the incredible spirit of human solidarity must become even more infectious than the coronavirus itself". The Director-General of WHO concluded by asking countries to unite as never before. The UN Secretary-General, for his part, made a call to cease fire in all conflicts in the world to allow a more effective response to the pandemic.