Rwanda last week was ranked sixth among the countries that handled Covid-19 outbreak best by the Australia-based Lowy Institute. In its global analysis, dubbed the COVID Performance Index, the Aussie think-tank ranked 98 countries and found that smaller populations and capable institutions were the most important factors in successfully managing the pandemic. As it turned out, Rwanda was the only African country in the top 10, with countries like United States, Iran and Brazil among those at the bottom of the ranking. The index echoes several previous rankings which showed that Rwanda’s approach to the fight against the virus had been both timely and effective. In particular, the country has been recognised for its sense of responsiveness and openness in its response, even publishing nightly updates on new confirmed cases, deaths among others. Since Rwanda first recorded a Covid case back in March 2020, the country has been consistently relying on scientific evidence and promoting recommendations by the World Health Organisation in its response to the pandemic. While this called for tough measures, including national and local lockdowns as well as other tight restrictions on people’s movement and businesses, this approach has helped the country contain the situation and kept both new confirmed cases and deaths relatively low. And when there was a surge in cases in the days that followed the festive season, the Government took quick action, imposing a second lockdown on the capital Kigali, while it also banned inter-district movement and increased curfew hours elsewhere in the country. Then, authorities embarked on a grassroots testing campaign with far more daily tests carried out in Kigali recently compared to previous trends, with view to determining the Covid positivity rate in the community. Now, as you’d expect with this virus, the more tests you run the more positive cases you are likely to detect, and so it was rather obvious that the testing campaign returned a couple of hundreds of new daily positive cases. Subsequently, the positivity rate in the capital reached 4 per cent, according to officials. However, the numbers have since somewhat fallen recently, arguably due to the lockdown in the capital. Unfortunately, the United Kingdom surprised Rwandans and the science community when it included Rwandans on the list of foreign nationals banned from travelling to the UK despite the absence of any facts or scientific evidence to support the decision. This is absurd coming from a country that claims to be following science in its response to the Covid-19 pandemic. If anything, it is Rwanda that should have banned travellers from the UK as the latter is currently battling a new, more transmissible variant of Covid-19. Yet, Rwanda has chosen to stick to science by diligently implementing evidence-based Covid response. In this global fight against a common enemy, decisions that are politically motivated, rather than based on scientific evidence, only serve to undermine public confidence in science as the reliable path out of this unprecedented public health crisis.
