The Kenyan government on Wednesday classified Namanga, the border town with Tanzania, as a COVID-19 high-risk area following a surge in numbers of cases of the virus at border points.
Kenya has recently taken to testing foreign truck drivers who wish to enter the country from Tanzania following a rise in the number of truck drivers who are testing positive for the virus.
The designation came as the Kenyan Ministry of Health announced that 25 foreign truck drivers from Tanzania had tested positive for COVID-19. 23 of the truck drivers were Tanzanian while the other two were Ugandan and Rwandan.
This means that about 30 Tanzanian truck drivers so far have tested positive for COVID-19, according to figures from the ministry.
“This (Namanga) is an area that we have now classified as a high-risk based on COVID-19 positive cases detected at border crossing points,” Kenya’s Health Chief Administrative Secretary Rashid Aman said.
According to the ministry the truck drivers were denied entry and referred back to Tanzania.
“We do this testing on the other side but those truck drivers remain on the Tanzanian side of the border on Tanzanian soil,” Aman added.
In response to this, the ministry said it will deploy a fully-equipped mobile laboratory to the border town of Namanga in the south to test foreign truck drivers coming in from Tanzania as part of measures to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This facility will be key in surveillance and monitoring of the virus in this region,” Aman said.
The country is to receive two laboratories as part of an EAC programme to improve disease surveillance and monitoring within member states.
Aman said that the laboratory was being deployed to Namanga out of the Kenyan government’s interest in protecting its people despite whatever was going on in Tanzania.
The ministry’s Director-General Dr. Patrick Amoth added that the deployment was also to prevent any snarl up at the border and allow seamless movement of cargo.
Tanzania’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has come under global scrutiny with the government failing to release any new data on the pandemic. The last day Tanzania released any data on the virus was on April 29.
Tanzanian authorities have downplayed the extent of the pandemic while President John Magufuli accused local health officials of exaggerating the health crisis.
Magufuli himself has been criticised for not ordering the closure of churches and mosques and asking people to pray for the disease to go away. He had also dismissed COVID-19 testing kits as faulty after claiming that they returned positive results on samples taken from a goat and a pawpaw.
The US embassy in Tanzania on Wednesday warned of a risk in “exponential growth” of COVID-19 cases and advised Americans living in Tanzania to stay at home and limit interactions with people other than those they live with.
