Coronavirus: You’ve heard the ugly, here are three ‘positives’ on the continent

The World Health Organization declared the rapid spreading coronavirus a pandemic on Wednesday 11 March. Since the confirmation of the first cases of the scourge in the Chinese city of Wuhan on January 7, 2020, there are 294,110 confirmed cases with 12,944 confirmed deaths in 187 locations globally.

In Africa, some 739 confirmed cases have been confirmed with 20 deaths. WHO’s Director-General, Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he expects the outbreak to worsen. “We expect to see the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the number of affected countries climb even higher,” he said.

With the spread of the deadly outbreak gaining pace in Africa, China’s richest man and founder of e-commerce company Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, donated 20,000 coronavirus test kits to each African country.

Ma’s generosity also comes with 100,000 masks and 1,000 protective suits and shields for each of the 54 countries.

In a statement that accompanied the announcement of the kits to African countries, Ma said his donation was to help “take precautions now and get prepared ahead of time.”

The statement also said, “In addition, we will immediately start working with medical institutions in Africa to provide online training material for COVID-19 clinical treatment.”

As Africa records more cases and governments across the continent announce stringent measures aimed at halting the widespread of the scourge, Face2face Africa looks at some of the ‘positive’ impacts it made on the continent.