Cameroon has recorded 500 new COVID-19 cases signalling a drastic jump in coronavirus cases in the country as a second wave is feared.
According to the Ministry of Public Health, Cameroon currently counts 916 active cases with 500 new cases registered within the last week alone, marking a new spike since the advent of the pandemic in the country in March this year.
Dr Georges Alain Etoundi Mballa, Director of the fight against the coronavirus, epidemics and pandemics in the Ministry of Public Health on Thursday, revealed that Cameroon currently counts 23,528 COVID-19 patients, with 22,177 patients successfully treated and discharged from hospital, while 435 have since died.
Mballa disclosed that there has been a resurgence of CoVID-19 cases in the Littoral and West Regions, two regions where, he said, the government-prescribed barrier measures have relentlessly been neglected.
He said two weeks ago, 20 students and teachers tested positive for COVID-19 in three schools in the national economic capital Douala alone.
Several new cases have also been registered in several towns and villages in the West Region as well as in Kribi in the South Region.
Faced with this new alarming spike in the number of Covid-19 cases, the health authorities have sounded an alarm and called on the populations to be vigilant and to continue respecting the barrier measures put in place since the advent of the pandemic in the country, namely the obligatory wearing of face masks, regular washing of hands and physical distancing.
The new wave of the pandemic has long been in the wings and just waiting to happen as the national community had abandoned virtually all the barrier measures ordered by the government.
This Reporter recently visited an educational complex housing a nursery, primary, secondary and high schools, where one of his grandchildren attends school.
“I was surprised that I found not a single child nor a single teacher in the school complex wearing a face mask. In fact, when I showed up in the Principal’s office wearing a face mask and refusing to shake hands with the principal, everybody there looked at me as if I had just fallen from Mars”, this writer reports.
Most Cameroonians would have wanted to copy the barrier measures demonstrated by their leaders but this has not been the case because even the head of state President Paul Biya who appears on TV spots every evening calling on Cameroonians to wear face masks does not wear one himself even in the sensitization spots.
“The first time President Paul Biya wore a face mask in public was during the funeral of his senior sister last week. If he can appear only once in eight months respecting the face mask barrier measure, what message was he sending to his compatriots?”, asked an angry civil society activist in Yaounde yesterday.
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