Browsing: covid in tanzania

With $571 million in loan money at stake, Tanzania that has until now withheld all Covid-19 data has announced that it will now make the statistics public. Question is, if withholding the data stayed public panic and allowed production to continue?  How will announcing the data affect the country’s economy? Will the public continue to operate business as usual or will fear impede productivity?

There is no doubt that Tanzania is one of the few countries in the world that had positive economic growth all through the worst of Covid-19 outbreaks. Granted the rate of growth fell, but it remained on an upward trajectory nonetheless. Many pundits have attributed this positive economic growth to the country’s ‘lax’ border control and zero lockdowns during the entire time.

Further still, Tanzania stopped reporting cases of Covid-19 on April 29, 2020 when the country had 509 infections, 183 recoveries and 21 deaths. Further, …

The President of Tanzania, H.E. John Pombe Magufuli has raised a storm on the social media after questioning some of the tests conducted on Tanzanian patients, which he attributes to either poor workmanship in the National Referral Laboratory or faulty kits.

In a televised speech, the Tanzanian leader narrated how his security agents submitted different samples from domestic and wild animals as well as fruits and even natural oil, all disguised as human samples with queer results of goat, pawpaw and quail all returning positive for Covid-19.

Though this has become an online buzz, this has also raised critical questions on the validity of tests currently being used in Africa, mainly from China. There have been fears of the tests returning an invalid result painting a wrong picture of the pandemic.

African countries have been heavily relying on donated kits with Chinese billionaire Jack Ma sending in over one million …