Africa needs to increase Covid-19 testing, genomic sequencing

Rumbidzayi Zinyuke
Senior Health Reporter

The World Health Organisation has called for African countries to increase capacity for testing as well as genomic sequencing to detect the wide-spreading Covid-19 Omicron variant which has already been detected in 63 countries across the world.

The Omicron was declared a variant of concern by the world health body last month owing to its highly unusual profile with a significantly higher number of mutations from the four earlier variants of concern.

Speaking to journalists from East and Southern Africa during a cross-border science cafe on Tuesday, WHO country representative for Zimbabwe Dr Alex Gasasira said the rate at which the new strain was spreading was a cause for concern.

“Omicron is growing much faster than Delta which was up to now the fastest growing variant,” he said.

“We know that countries like South Africa, Mozambique, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Eswatini are also seeing large increases in the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases.

“We may all know that for example in Zimbabwe now, last week, we recorded 28 000 new cases. This is the highest number of cases reported in a single week’s time since the pandemic started.

“The previous highest number of cases recorded in one week was around 15 000 and this was mid-July this year at the height of the third wave.”

Due to this increase in numbers, Dr Gasasira said it was important for countries to increase testing capacity to establish the extent to which their populations were infected and implement measures to control transmission.

He highlighted the need to improve genomic sequencing to determine the variants circulating among the populations.

“Countries are also encouraged to develop capacity for genomic sequencing so that we know which variant we are dealing with,” said Dr Gasasira.

“Many countries are getting this, but we need to do more of genomic sequencing. In Zimbabwe, we are not sequencing as much as we expect. The Government and Ministry of Health and partners are doing their best, but we are not sequencing a very large number of samples.

“This means we can only postulate that the rapid increase in cases is because of the new variant.”

Dr Gasasira said a number of studies were ongoing to understand the characteristics of the Omicron variant.

“Additional samples have been collected in Zimbabwe and they are being sent to the labs that have the capacity to do Genetic Sequencing including here in Zimbabwe,” he said.

“So, we expect in the coming weeks to have confirmation that yes, the majority of cases that we are seeing here are due to the new Omicron.”