-And it is not the way to proceed against COVID-19 in Liberia
By William Selmah, wselmah@gmail.com
The man who headed Liberia’s Incident Management Team during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 on Tuesday, April 14, 2020 called on Liberian health authorities not to emulate the widely-adapted lockdown strategy in most parts of Asia, Europe and the Americas.
In a lengthy phone interview with the private Truth FM Radio in Monrovia, Mr. Tolbert Nyenswah, who headed the National Public Health Institute (NPHIL) prior to his departure to the United States, said what is workable in those parts of the world may not necessarily be applicable in Liberia, and most African settings due to the systems economic realities.
Mr. Nyenswah, who is currently Senior Research Associate at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, pointed out that “lockdown of Monrovia will not stop the spread of corona virus; it may help to some extent, but it will not stop the spread.”
What is especially needed, he said, is a great command and control coordinating system put in place, something he noted, is still lacking in the fight against COVID-19 in Liberia.
“People have to practice some sort of social distancing which is not necessarily lockdown,” Nyenswah, one of the men who emerged as a hero from the Ebola outbreak, recommended.
He warned that continuous seizure of civil liberties of people who are hungry and are receiving no help whatsoever from government could spiral agitation that might degenerate into rebellion.
The former NPHIL Director General noted that one of the initial missteps in the fight against Ebola was the introduction of what he terms “draconian coercion approaches”, making reference to the quarantining of the West Point and Dolo Town communities which resulted into fatalities, but did not work.
According to him, the coronavirus disease in Liberia presents a perfect opportunity for systems put in place in the aftermath of the outbreak to be tested.
“The same structures that were put in place to combat Ebola remains intact and that there was no need to “reinvent the wheels,” adding that when systems that were put in place proved to have worked, it is always good to go back and refer to them.
Said Mr. Nyenswah: “Before leaving, I took Presidential Affairs Minister Nathaniel McGill and Finance Minister Samuel Tweah to the lab and introduced them to the trained microbiologists, epidemiologists and laboratory technicians we had in that lab.”
He also said though the modes of transmission of Ebola and the novel coronavirus are different, the modes of tackling them are not dissimilar.
Considering the lessons learnt from the Ebola crisis and the structures put in place following that pandemic which remain intact, the former NPHIL boss said Liberia should by now be ahead of the curve.
But Mr. Nyenswah identified some of the key obstacles to the combat against COVID-19 as lack of a central command coordinating center, with the Health Ministry, NPHIL and Montserrado [County Health Team] meeting separately.
Former President Sirleaf made several cogent decisions that led to a breakthrough against Ebola, the Senior Research Associate at John Hopkins said.
One of those decisions, Mr. Nyenswah said was to ensure that that ministers involved with day to day tasks were not in charge of Ebola response as was the case from the onset of the outbreak.
“You need 100% devotion to response to the outbreak. My team and I regularly worked 12 hours daily and most often had six hours or less to rest before resuming the following day,” the former NPHIL boss stressed.
Said Nyensuah: “You can’t have a minister working and running a health system while at the same time in charge of the command system or the incident management system. The person in charge of psychosocial support or risk management cannot be the minister running a ministry.
He added that when he managed Ebola, his partners were very much committed because of the strategy they saw in place, under which the head of the Incident Management Team reported directly to the President.
Mr. Nyenswah also spoke against the practice of segregating against media institutions in Liberia, saying, they need to be holistically inclusive.’