A report by journalist Baba Ahmed has come out of Timbuktu that Covid-19 has reached the city, with around five hundred cases so far, and at least nine deaths. The local hospital has put up tents to house the Covid-19 patients, and there are no ventilators. So far they have enough oxygen tanks to treat the thirty two patients, but they are struggling to find enough nurses. They also have no radiologists to read chest x-rays, no lung specialists with experience in respiratory diseases and no doctors who specialise in kidney diseases, which is one of the complications of the virus. There have also been problems in getting samples to a lab that can do the tests, though Timbuktu has now been sent a team with a mobile laboratory which is capable of processing a hundred tests a day.
No-one is sure how the virus got from Bamako (where the first Covid-19 case in Mali was recorded) to Timbuktu - there is a bus from Bamako to Timbuktu several times a week, and the trip takes about 24 hours, though an infected person could also have arrived by car.
The north of Mali is still a dangerous place where the UN still has regular peace-keeping patrols against the extremists there, and the population is mostly nomadic, which adds to the difficulties of controlling any outbreaks of disease there.
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