Testing, vaccines are best ways out

Our chances of robustly fighting Covid keeps on improving, especially with news that Uganda has received more 647,000 Moderna vaccines from USA and will again receive more 1.6 million doses of Pfizer vaccines. 

Even better is the news that this batch of vaccine will be dedicated to priority groups who haven’t yet got any jab. 

But as Uganda presses for more vaccines and have many more citizens vaccinated, we have to worry about positive test cases from travelers into the country. Precisely for this reason, Members of Parliament (MPs) on the committee of Health are right to call for mandatory testing of travelers entering the country in order to protect public health. 

But this is not without resistance. 

Among those who protest the move are players in the tourism sector who believe that imposing the mandatory testing, comes with increased overhead costs for foreign tourists? Their argument is that this whittles down tourist numbers. 

But all these concerns pale in the face of infiltrating more Covid cases into the country.

Through May to August alone, the Ministry of Health has recorded at least 697 positive cases among international travellers entering the country from through Entebbe International Airport. 

Sadly, this detection is negligible and does not exhaustively tell the entire story as only 10 per cent of the travelers from Kenya, United Aram Emirates, South Sudan, Tanzania, and South Africa numbers are tested. This, therefore, demands that stringent measures be instituted to manage the situation, including mandatory testing upon arrival at the country’s main airport, and border-crossing points. 

This calls for choice of well-equipped and competent labs among those accredited to undertake testing to ensure consistency and quality assurance of results and prompt turn-around time of the results. This, we believe, should help to stop fresh incidences being added to our hard-to-manage national Covid burden. It should also help to relieve stress on our often times stressed medical care facilities. 

Moreover, this should help to stop issuances of fake Covid certificates, or middle men fiddling with the data remotely.

Even as these measures are undertaken, the government needs to have a definite rollout plan that prioritizes groups that most interact with the public. These include teachers and pupils, and students, medical workers, journalists, transporters, traders and market vendors, 

In this way, as we continue to get in more vaccines and immunize more of our target 22 million people, we can close out Covid with tough standard operating procedures or SOPs.