Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan on Friday urged the public not to ignore the third wave of COVID-19 and to strictly observe precautionary measures against the pandemic, reported The Times Of India.
“I am appealing to fellow Tanzanians to take all precautions against the pandemic to avoid mass deaths,” President Hassan said in a televised address to Catholic bishops in Dar es Salaam.
This is the first time the east African nation has admitted the prevalence of the pandemic since the country last released data on COVID-19 in May last year.
The Tanzanian president also confirmed the admission of COVID-19 patients in the country’s hospitals. She said she found COVID-19 patients in a recent visit to a referral hospital in the commercial capital Dar es Salaam.
Hassan said Tanzania had already gone through the first and second waves of the pandemic and is currently witnessing the third wave, without revealing the total number of cases.
“We came from the first wave and Tanzania was affected,” she added. “The second wave came and dropped and now there is the third wave. There are signs of the third wave in our country. We have Covid-19 patients who have been seen in this third wave.”
She made an appeal to the religious leaders to help the government educate people on the need to take precautions, including wearing face masks, washing hands with running water, and avoiding crowds.
Notably, former Tanzanian President John Magufuli, who died on 18 March, had consistently downplayed the pandemic. He asked the public to rely on prayers to defeat the virus and declared vaccines potentially dangerous. The country has not published statistics on the epidemic since April 2020. The last figures reported were 509 cases and 16 deaths.
Meanwhile, on Monday, a committee of experts on Covid-19 recommended that official figures on the spread of the disease in the country be resumed after more than a year’s break. The task force also called for coronavirus vaccines for frontline workers and vulnerable people.
