Via Vox.com: How Senegal fought Covid-19 with lessons learned from Ebola and HIV/AIDS prevention. Excerpt:
DAKAR, Senegal — Aissatou Diao talked about Covid-19 a lot. How to socially distance, what to do if you have a cough or a fever. But when the first coronavirus case arrived in Yeumbeul, a village outside Dakar where she does health outreach as a community relay, she couldn’t believe it.
“I almost died when I heard I was on the list of people who were in contact with the Covid patient,” Diao recalls.
That single contact brought Diao to Novotel, an upscale hotel in Dakar with Atlantic Ocean views. As part of its pandemic response, Senegal sought to provide a bed to everyone with Covid-19 — including mild or asymptomatic cases — and their direct contacts. In the spring of 2020, for about six months, Red Cross volunteers replaced hotel staff at Novotel, and rooms filled with people like Diao, exposed to Covid-19 and sent away to isolate.
Her fellow community relays, who did Covid-19 outreach with her, kept calling and calling to check her status. They wanted to know if they’d be next. “We all got ready with our luggage, waiting for the results,” one of them said.
Diao tested negative, twice, and she left quarantine after just four days. A year later, she calls it a funny story: a short stay in quarantine as she tries to make others aware of the seriousness of Covid-19.
Diao’s experience captures both sides of Senegal’s Covid-19 response. The West African country used aggressive interventions like this isolation policy to slow transmission. At the same time, community and local health actors bolstered the public health response from the bottom up, relying on longstanding relationships and trust to convince people to wear masks, seek out testing, and get treatment.
“We have what we call a ‘chain of solidarity’: The nation joined hands together,” Moussa Seydi, chief of infectious disease service at Dakar’s University of Fann Hospital Center, said. “Religious leaders came to join the political decision-makers, and also, the community involved themselves in giving this response to Covid-19.”
