African health authorities have stepped up preparations for what experts fear is an inevitable outbreak of coronavirus as the US warned that the continent was an “Achilles heel” and risked becoming the “soft underbelly of the outbreak”.
The White House late last week called in more than 50 ambassadors and diplomats from nearly 40 African countries to discuss their response, amid fears that an outbreak would severely test the ability of weak health systems to diagnose and contain the virus.
Only two laboratories in sub-Saharan Africa — the Institut Pasteur in Senegal and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa — are able to test for the virus, raising concern that cases could go undetected or might already exist.
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