The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has praised the government’s swift action to combat Covid-19, which saw it impose a stringent national lockdown barely three weeks after the first case was confirmed in SA on March 5.
The lockdown has confined all but essential workers to their homes, and brought the economy to a virtual standstill in an effort to slow transmission of the coronavirus and buy the government time to ready the health system.
“African countries have been well ahead of many of their northern counterparts in taking strong and effective action early,” said Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman. “We can see many of the benefits across the continent from SA to Rwanda, to Nigeria to Ethiopia. We absolutely applaud the political leadership that has done this. (It) has been a key reason the disease has not had as strong an impact on Africa as many feared in the early days,” he said.
The highly contagious respiratory disease has raced around the globe since it first emerged in China in late December: by Thursday it had sickened more than 2-million people and caused more than 139,000 deaths. It has hit the US and European countries particularly hard, but as of Thursday there had been just 2,605 cases and 48 deaths in SA.
The Gates Foundation announced on Wednesday that it would more than double its financial commitments to global efforts to combat Covid-19, taking its total support to $255m (R4.76bn). It has pledged a further $150m on top of funds committed earlier this year, boosting support for organisations such as the African Centre for Disease Control that assist countries with training and technical advice, and adding fresh impetus to the race to develop new vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests.
A condition of the foundation’s funding was that these new tools would be affordable and accessible to all countries, not just those with deep pockets, said Suzman.
The Gates Foundation opposed US President Donald Trump’s decision to suspend its support to the World Health Organisation (WHO), he said.
“We have been disturbed to see the calls by the US government to withhold funding from the WHO. This is not the right time to do that, and we hope that does not in fact take place. The WHO needs all the resources it can get,” he said.
The Gates Foundation is the second-biggest donor to the WHO after the US government.
Trump stunned global leaders when he announced on Tuesday that he was freezing funding to the WHO. A statement released by the White House said he put all US funding to the WHO was on hold pending an investigation into its “mismanagement” of the pandemic.
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