Content provided by Dr. Nada Fadul.
Sudan emerged from a 30-year dictatorship in 2019 to face the COVID-19 pandemic with a fragile health system and a half-finished transitional government structure. During the dictatorship, the majority of GDP was spent on military and security forces and very little was spent on health. This led to privatization of healthcare and a near complete collapse of the previously well-structured public health sector. In the beginning of the pandemic, the country did not have any infrastructure or funding for public health services which made it difficult to conduct proper testing and contact tracing. Transitional government officials elected to enter a state or lockdown which was poorly received by the public due to the economic hardships the country was going through. In addition, conspiracy theories from the previous regime allies spread rapidly promoting the myth that COVID-19 does not exist and that the transitional government is using it as an excuse to suppress protestors. In our recently published article, “Re-opening Sudan: the Balance Between Maintaining Daily Living and Avoiding the Next Peak of COVID-19”, we emphasize the role that the community (including religious leaders, youth neighborhood committees and diaspora organizations) played and continue to play in the fight against COVID-19 and we urge the government to develop a formal mechanism to channel these efforts so that their outcomes can be tracked and documented.
Read more from Dr. Fadul and colleagues in there published manuscript ” Re-opening Sudan: the Balance Between Maintaining Daily Living and Avoiding the Next Peak of COVID-19″ Citation: Fadul, Nada, Mohamed E. Hussein, and Abdelaal A. Fadul. “Re-opening Sudan: the Balance Between Maintaining Daily Living and Avoiding the Next Peak of COVID-19.” Current Tropical Medicine Reports (2021): 1-7.
Additional information about Dr. Fadul’s work with Sudan can also be found here.