Young Man Wisdom

The last time I talked about the number of cases was on May 9th. on that date, Sudan reached 1000 cases. And I was planning to write another piece when Sudan reached 2000 cases but due to the rapid increase in numbers of cases, I was not able to catch up. Now, The number of confirmed cases is 3138 and of those 121 expired (3.9%). The mortality rate has declined which I hope indicates more testing. The number of cases is doubling every five days. As I said before it is not a surprise considering the lack of social distancing. However, for some reason, the situation in Sudan is worst when compared to other countries in East Africa in terms of mortality and the number of cases. Considering that some of these countries did not go all the way with the lockdown policy as Sudan did. I hope the number of new cases will stabilise over the next few days but with Eid coming and current lack of political stability, it is unlikely that this will happen.

The health system in Sudan is messed up! Sudan governing system is federal. This means the provision of health services is the responsibility of each state. This includes dealing with the workforce from medical to supporting staff. Each state should run it according to its health priorities and budget. Health priorities of Khartoum are different from Gadarif. Hence different spending priorities. The question that we need to answer is what is the role of the federal ministry of health is going to be as federalism is here to stay. Firstly, the role of the federal health ministry should be limited to a certain aspect of the health system. The FHM role should be the provision of a road map to improve public health in general. The emphasis should be on prevention as it is the most effective and rewarding. However, the states need to run these programs, and the federal ministry should provide technical support and training. Secondly: The federal ministry should be responsible for establishin...

Today Sudan reached a milestone in this pandemic by confirming more than 1,000 cases of COVID-19. Khartoum state remains the epicentre of the virus but recently the number of cases in other states started to increase. It is not a surprise we reached this milestone, it was expected considering the continuous lack of effective social distancing and political instability. Despite the introduction of lock measures more than four weeks ago, the number of new cases continues to increase daily. And the logarithmic curve has not flattened yet. If this rate of daily new cases continues as it is, Sudan should brace itself for a big jump in cases are more likely more fatalities. The current pandemic demonstrated how fragile the health system is. The infrastructure for health surveillance, early detection, contact tracing and isolation almost not existing or it is not effective. By next week if the curve does not show any signs of slowing down Sudan should get ready for a crisis that Sudan has not...

I always had an interest in Public health because it showed me the big picture. As, doctors, we always get consumed with what in front of us and the daily routine, but we do not stop and ask ourselves where all these diseases come from and what we can do about it. During this pandemic, the public suddenly became aware of many new vocabularies. Terms such as ventilators, N95 masks, and flatting the curve became a meme. However, when it comes to curves, there are different types of dealing with them. In this public health intervention, by asking the public to practice social distancing, we aim to spread the cases over a longer period so as the health services can deal with the increased caseload and demand in intensive-care beds. Without social distancing, the rise in the number of cases will be sharp, but the health service will not be able to cope with the flooded of cases which will lead to doctors have to make the hard decisi...