It turns out that East Africa may be a coronavirus success story!

This was not what I expected to discover when I indulged my curiosity about how the pandemic was playing out in Africa. Though at opposite ends of the continent, Egypt and South Africa have major outbreaks of COVID-19, some of the countries in between are succeeding in keeping the pandemic under control.

Edward Carpenter and Charli Carpenter suggest in the Washington Post that East Africa might have "a few things to teach the United States." Yes, much of this area suffers from wide-spread poverty, few medical resources, civil wars, and weak governments -- but also, these societies been here before, struggling to contain cholera, Ebola, and HIV. They know what to do when the enemy is disease.

These writers (a U.S. military officer and a U. Mass-Amherst political scientist) lay out several strands in East Africa's successful pandemic preparedness. Governments took advantage of the warning time watching Chinese, European, and U.S. stumbles, implementing science-based planning, and putting out popularly intelligible explanations of what needed to be done.

[T]heir governments took early preventive measures. ... the presidents of South Sudan, Kenya and Uganda issued detailed proclamations and decreed strong measures to delay the arrival of it and suppress its spread — in most cases before any cases had been detected.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was particularly eloquent and detail-oriented, explaining what the virus was, how it was transmitted and who was at risk, before laying out a plan to systematically close schools, churches and borders, to begin social distancing, and to put a hold on weddings and funerals. ... Notably, all of these measures were rolled out in a controlled manner without political posturing, and with reasonable time built in to set the guidelines in motion. ...

Closed borders, cessation of international air traffic, and shutting down big public gatherings destroyed the tourist trade, but governments successfully made the case that health was more to be prized than the economies.

According to the two Carpenters, past experience with pandemics sunk in deeply.

The United States has also had its share of pandemics: yellow fever, the 1918 flu, HIV-AIDS and SARS. The difference may be a willingness to put lessons learned into action. ...

In this country, we've shown ourselves all too willing to forget, underfund, and rush on to the next new thing.

One of the lessons learned in East Africa from past pandemics has been that international cooperation matters.

These countries make up the membership of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). The organization met March 30 by video-teleconference and resolved to jointly formulate a regional response, establish an emergency fund and mobilize support from the global community and from IGAD medical professionals in the diaspora.

The crisis has even caused some prominent local leaders to double down on a global approach to economic policy, with Museveni saying: “I have warned our people to stop talking like the selfish foreigners by trying to stop the little we have being exported to other African countries. We can keep a bit for ourselves, but we shall share with the others whatever we have.”

Whether all this preparedness will continue to moderate the impact of COVID-19 remains to be seen.

A friend who lives in the region very much concurs with this picture of the impact. She sees a government which has plenty of problems nonetheless doing what has to be done.

The outreach is very widespread re masks etc. and there are loudspeakers on vehicles going up and down the streets lecturing people about distancing. I think they are using a Cuban-designed house to house method in the urban areas with clusters. They also have special hospitals set up. I think Ebola preparedness has made a difference.

These are emerging nations which can still get things done, even amid very difficult pre-existing challenges.

It does seem worth asking, how did the U.S. lose that get-up-and-go capacity? The answers, and there are certainly many, pre-date Trump though he's very good at making the bad much worse. Might this be what happens as empire decays? So it seems.