By Mohamed Fofanah.
The Chairman of the National Covid-19 Emergency Response Centre (NaCOVERC) yesterday announced that Sierra Leone has bent the curve, and permanently flattened the third-wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, and puts the virus under control.
This follows the United Kingdom Government’s risk assessment survey on 19th July that put Sierra Leone on a red list of countries with great Covid-19 risk and vulnerability. “We don’t have Covid-19 calamity in Sierra Leone,” Sheku Fantamadi Bangura announced at an emergency press briefing held at the Ministry of Information and Communications in Freetown yesterday but admitted that the pandemic remains active in the country.
Bangura reiterated that their data shows that Sierra Leone should not be among the red list of countries because the country has recorded a decreasing number of positive Covid-19 cases with an average test of 3,500, and 5,500 weekly.
He added that the country has recorded single digits in the last couple of days as it keeps the positivity rates around 3.1%, which is way below the WHO threshold of 5% positivity rates.
Elsewhere, a total number of 135, 590 people have received the first dose of either the AstraZeneca or Sinopharm vaccines, while 32,607 have received the second dose of either of the vaccines, according to Dr. Tom Sesay, Pillar Lead for Vaccination at NaCOVERC.
NaCOVERC data shows that out of 2,712 suspected cases captured in the DHIS2, there have been 1,340 total positive cases, 1,290 had not been vaccinated. 26 had received one dose, eight had received two doses, and four positives had received two doses of either of the vaccines, more than two weeks earlier.
