Coronavirus: Kenya lacks health infrastructure

Kenya has only 11 isolation beds ready for use in the event of a coronavirus epidemic, which has so far killed 2,928 people worldwide, the ministry of health warned.

The arrival in Nairobi of 239 passengers on a flight from China on Wednesday morning aboard China Southern Airlines has sparked an outcry in Kenya as the government has taken no measures to protect its nationals from possible infection.

The country does not have an isolation ward in the event of Coronavirus infection.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization said on Friday that countries must act quickly and robustly to contain the corona-virus COVID-19 epidemic, as it raised the global risk assess-ment of the infection to “very high.”

 

The development comes as WHO Director-General Tedros Ad-hanom Ghebreyesus reported that in the past 24 hours, China had recorded its lowest number of cases in more than a month (329), with 78,959 cases in total.

More than 36,000 people have also recovered from COVID-19 in China alone, WHO said.

 

The rest of the world has continued to show an uptick in in-fections, however, with 4,351 cases confirmed in 49 countries and 67 deaths.

According to WHO, 24 cases of infection had been exported from Italy to 14 countries and 97 cases had found their way from Iran to 11 countries.