KAARO KARUNGI | NEWS – The government Uganda has announced that the country is now in the second wave of Covid-19 pandemic after the number of infections increased by 81 per cent between March and April.
The government has warned of tough containment measures including possibility of a total lockdown, if the situation goes out of hand.
While addressing journalists at Ministry of Health headquarters in Kampala yesterday evening, Dr Misaki Wayengera, the chairperson of the ministerial scientific advisory committee, said the second wave is going to be more severe and the country could experience what is happening in India.
“The pandemic often starts slowly with a lag phase and then there is a rapid phase, and finally we hit a stationary phase.
We are in the second wave of the pandemic only that we are in the lag phase,” Dr Wayengera said.
He added: “We might hit a point where infections rapidly go up as it happened in India. Unfortunately, given that we have active transmission going on in the communities, this might be the same thing that will happen to us.”
The Minister of Health, Dr Jane Ruth Aceng, said the resurgence is presenting with rising cases of infections among children.
“We have started to experience a significant increase in cases of Covid-19 among the 10-29 age group. We registered a 12 per cent increase in cases among children aged 10-19 years and 5 per cent increase in those aged 20-29,” she told journalists.
The government announced last week that besides the Indian strain, the country had also registered four other strains including Ugandan, Nigerian, South African and UK variants.
Dr Ruth Acen said some of the districts hit most by Covid-19 clusters of community infections are Kiryandongo, Adjumani, Soroti, Oyam, Gulu and Jinja.
“The emergence of the cases in Jinja is attributed to a cluster of individuals working in a factory in Buikwe District, one of whom recently arrived from India, and four being close contacts,” she said.
