EDITORIAL


The Homeless, Inmates and Refugees in Africa in the Face of COVID-19 Outbreak



Olanrewaju Oladimeji1, 2, 3, *, Bamidele Paul Atiba2, 4, Jabu A Mbokazi1, Francis Leonard Mpotte Hyera1
1 Department of Public Health, Walter Sisulu University, Eastern Cape, South Africa
2 Faculty of Health Sciences, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa
3 Department of Family Medicine and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Botswana, Botswana
4 Federal Teaching Hospital, Ido-Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria


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Creative Commons License
© 2020 Oladimeji et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Public Health, Walter Sisulu University, Eastern Cape, South Africa; E-mail: ooladimeji@wsu.ac.za


Editorial

Total well-being and care for the vulnerable, especially the homeless, inmates, and refugees during the COVID-19 pandemic, is one of the barometers to measure Africa's response. Hence in the light of this scenario, our comment is on their care during this devastating period. We compared what is currently being done in the western world with what the African countries are doing. We have posed particular challenges with the welfare packages, the implementation of physical distances, good hygiene practices, limited access to screening and testing of COVID-19, as the outbreak invasion could be overwhelming if there is no intervention to bridge this gap. There is, therefore, an urgent need to consider welfare packages, an optimum hygiene environment, decongestion, and mass screening and testing for these groups of individuals, as they also have equal human rights to be protected during this pandemic.