Short report on implications of Covid-19 and emerging zoonotic infectious diseases for pastoralists and Africa

Consequences of COVID-19 on the Reindeer Husbandry in Norway: a Pilot Study Among Management Staff and Herders

The outbreak of COVID-19 has had an enormous impact on most of society. The most effective measure to prevent the spread has been reducing mobility, which is especially problematic for pastoralists relying on mobility to follow the movement of their livestock. We investigated to what degree Norwegian reindeer husbandry and the reindeer husbandry management system are affected by COVID-19 and government restrictions to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. For reindeer herders, our main finding was that the COVID-19 had little to no impact on their daily work. However, impacts varied by domain, with work in corrals, income, and slaughter being negatively affected. For employees in the management system, communication/contact with herders and visits/control of corrals/slaughter have been negatively affected. Employees in the management system were satisfied with how information concerning COVID-19 and prevention measures have been communicated by the central government, while the herders were mainly dissatisfied.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10745-021-00295-0.

Addressing Africa's pandemic puzzle: Perspectives on COVID-19 transmission and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa

To date, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) has spread to almost every region of the world, infecting millions and resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Although it was predicted that Africa would suffer a massive loss of life due to this pandemic, the number of COVID-19 cases has been relatively low across the continent. Researchers have speculated that several factors may be responsible for this outcome in Africa, including the extensive experience that countries have with infectious diseases and the young median age of their populations. However, it is still important for African countries to adopt aggressive and bold approaches against COVID-19, in case the nature of the pandemic changes. This short review will summarize the status of the outbreak in Africa and propose possible reasons for current trends, as well as discuss interventions aimed at preventing a rapid increase in the number of COVID-19 cases in the future.

Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food security among East and West African pastoralists

The focus of attention regarding the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been on direct health outcomes and the macroeconomic impacts of control measures. Here we review the available evidence about the food security impacts of the pandemic on pastoralists in Eastern and Western Africa. While pastoralism occurs on more than 50% of the world's land area, the landscapes that pastoralists exploit tend to be remote and highly variable arid and semi-arid lands with low population densities. Over time pastoralists have developed sophisticated mechanisms to enhance their self-sufficiency. At the same time, remoteness and sociopolitical marginalization have resulted in higher rates of food insecurity and underdevelopment among pastoralists relative to more sedentary populations. These dynamics tend to be intractable to standardized food security, malnutrition, and economic development interventions. The COVID-19 pandemic is contributing to a worsening of food security trends in pastoralist areas of East and West Africa due to a multiplicity of factors, including the closure of livestock markets, movement restrictions, disruptions of supply chains and livestock production inputs, reduced frequency and quality of human and animal healthcare delivery, and lost income from complementary livelihoods. It opens, however, space for innovations that may contribute to the food-secure future of pastoralism, including adapting a One Health approach that addresses the social, economic, and environmental health determinants of food security among African pastoralists.

Africa's Nomadic Pastoralists and Their Animals Are an Invisible Frontier in Pandemic Surveillance

The effects of COVID-19 have gone undocumented in nomadic pastoralist communities across Africa, which are largely invisible to health surveillance systems despite the fact that they are of key significance in the setting of emerging infectious disease. We expose these landscapes as a “blind spot” in global health surveillance, elaborate on the ways in which current health surveillance infrastructure is ill-equipped to capture pastoralist populations and the animals with which they coexist, and highlight the consequential risks of inadequate surveillance among pastoralists and their livestock to global health. As a platform for further dialogue, we present concrete solutions to address this gap.

Predictors of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Prevention Practices Using Health Belief Model Among Employees in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2020

BACKGROUND

Ethiopia has taken strict preventive measures against COVID-19 to control its spread, to protect citizens, and ensure their wellbeing. Employee's adherence to preventive measures is influenced by their knowledge, perceived susceptibility, severity, benefit, barrier, cues to action, and self-efficacy. Therefore, this study investigated the predictors of COVID-19 prevention practice using the Health Belief Model among employees in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2020.

METHODS

Multicentre cross-sectional study design was used. A total of 628 employees selected by systematic sampling method were included in this study. Data were collected using a pretested self-administered questionnaire. Summary statistics of a given data for each variable were calculated. Logistic regression model was used to measure the association between the outcome and the predictor variable. Statistical significance was declared at p-value<0.05. Direction and strength of association were expressed using OR and 95% CI.

RESULTS

From a total of 628 respondents, 432 (68.8%) of them had poor COVID-19 prevention practice. Three hundred ninety-one (62.3%), 337 (53.7%), 312 (49.7), 497 (79.1%), 303 (48.2%) and 299 (52.4%) of the respondents had high perceived susceptibility, severity, benefit, barrier, cues to action and self-efficacy to COVID-19 prevention practice, respectively. Employees with a low level of perceived barriers were less likely to have a poor practice of COVID-19 prevention compared to employees with a high level of perceived barrier [AOR = 0.03, 95% CI (0.01,0.05)]. Similarly, employees with low cues to action and employees with a low level of self-efficacy were practiced COVID prevention measures to a lesser extent compared those with high cues to action and high level of self-efficacy [AOR = 0.05, 95% CI (0.026,0.10)] and [AOR = 0.08, 95% CI (0.04,0.14)], respectively.

CONCLUSION

The proportion of employees with poor COVID-19 prevention was high. Income, perceived barrier, cues to action, and self-efficacy were significantly associated with COVID-19 prevention practice.