Despite being classified by the World Bank as a low-income country, and despite its limited resources, Rwanda has vowed to identify every coronavirus case. Anyone who tests positive is immediately quarantined at a dedicated COVID-19 clinic. Any contacts of that case who are deemed at high risk are also quarantined, either at a clinic or at home, until they can be tested.
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Comprehensive contact tracing is a task that has overwhelmed countries with far more resources than Rwanda. Rwanda's per capita income is roughly $2,000 per year. Yet all testing and treatment for the virus is provided for free.
It costs the government between $50 and $100 to run a single coronavirus test, Nsanzimana says. In order to test thousands a day, Rwanda has started using a process called "pool testing." Material from 20-25 nasal swabs are all put into one vial and run through the machine. This allows them to test far more samples at once. If they get a positive result, then all the swabs that went into that initial vial are tested individually to pinpoint the person who's infected.
Nsanzimana says Rwanda's experience dealing with other infectious disease outbreaks is helping it now during the pandemic.
The country is using systems and equipment it already had in place to address HIV.
"The main machines we are using for COVID testing are the HIV machines that were (already) there," he says. "We are using the same structure, same people, same infrastructure and laboratory diagnostics, but applying it to COVID testing."
Useful to keep in mind the hot/cold reaction people have to Paul Kagame's government in Rwanda. This is not a soft democratic regime. It was born in genocide. The Rwandan Patriotic Front was a revolutionary group dedicated to protecting the Tutsi and in restoring order to Rwanda. Paul Kagame is a very effective authoritarian leader in a hard neighborhood.
Once in power, Kagame projected power into the Congo to take war directly to the Genocidaires who were sheltering in Congo. This helped instigate a major conflagration that is often called Africa's World War I. Millions perished, and continue to perish to this day.
