COVID-19’s Devastating Impact Continues
Kenya continues to experience a third wave of COVID-19 infections, though the number of cases and percent of positive tests have begun to decrease over the last several weeks. As of Friday, April 30, there have been 159,318 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Kenya and 2,724 deaths as a result of the virus.
Throughout the country, 1,300 people are currently admitted in healthcare facilities and more than 6,500 are on home-based care.
People throughout the AMPATH partnership are mourning the death of Dr. Patrick Chege, a leader in Kenyan Family Medicine and beloved colleague. Dr. Chege was the first Family Medicine trainee and physician in Kenya and helped to train most of the Family Medicine physicians in the country. He was instrumental in establishing a collaboration for trainees at Moi University to virtually collaborate with global health fellows and faculty at Brown University in the US, as well as partake in a bilateral rotational exchange program.
A truck carrying part of the new oxygen plant arrives at MTRH.
Jane Carter, MD, professor of medicine at the Alpert Medical School at Brown University, recalls, “I first met Dr. Patrick Chege in 2008 when the Dean told me he had chosen the recent graduate of the Moi University School of Medicine’s new Family Medicine MMED program as the first recipient of my Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholars Program grant. Dr. Chege used that grant to study characteristics of patients with diabetes in western Kenya, launching his research career. Little did I realize when I met him that day I was meeting the man that would be honored as one of the founding fathers of Family Medicine in Kenya and across sub-Saharan Africa.”
On a hopeful note, more than one million doses of the COVID vaccine have been distributed and more than 875,000 people have received the first dose of vaccine, including more than 155,000 health care workers.
Earlier this week the Kenya Ministry of Health announced that MTRH would establish the largest hospital-based oxygen generating plant in East or Central Africa with the capacity to produce 2000 liters of oxygen per minute by June.
Due to the surge of COVID-19 cases in India, Kenya has suspended all passenger flights for 14 days beginning at midnight on Saturday, May 1. Other restrictions on movement, curfews and limitations on gatherings announced previously remain in place.