At a busy East African border, testing truckers created perfect conditions for coronavirus to spread
NAMANGA, KENYA — When Habibu Juma Ali lined up his truck full of Whitedent toothpaste behind hundreds of others waiting to cross the border from Tanzania into Kenya, he didn’t expect to wait two weeks to get tested for the novel coronavirus.
Truckers are permitted to drive across the otherwise closed border between East Africa’s two biggest countries, but for the first two months of the pandemic, they had to get tested at the crossing. More than 150 tested positive and were turned back. The rest spent interminable days waiting for their results.
Ali has spent his days on both the Kenyan and Tanzanian sides of the border town of Namanga, where, when you’re on foot, you can cross the border as easily as crossing a road. He has bought food at shops, exchanged money at banks and, at night, he sleeps huddled with other drivers on cardboard mats underneath his truck. They cook and share meals with newcomers as the line of waiting trucks grows. Others find racier ways to pass the time — chewing khat, shooting dice, hiring sex workers.
The truckers’ growing web of interactions points to a dilemma at international borders: how to let essential trade through without the virus slipping in with it. At a meeting Friday to resolve the growing crisis, Kenya and Tanzania agreed that starting next week, drivers will have to get negative test certificates before starting their journeys. For many of the thousands of truckers who have already spent days or weeks in Namanga waiting for tests, that decision will have come too late.
“If my results come back positive, who can say how many people I’d have infected?” said Ali, 47. “I’m almost sure most of us here have now got the virus.”
The porous border, inefficient testing and limited contact tracing made this town an ideal place for the coronavirus to spread. Truckers say the long waits left them more susceptible to the virus and cost them time and money. The town’s business people, who interact with them on a daily basis, were caught between fear of contagion and unwillingness to give up their livelihoods.
Truck drivers distribute goods but also sometimes diseases, as became especially clear during HIV’s spread in Africa, where they carry the virus at double the rate of the general population. Truckers’ contacts are harder to trace than those of people who’ve traveled by airplane, for instance, where passenger lists are available. In Namanga, truck drivers have blended into the town as they wait, making contact tracing nearly impossible.
Kenya’s tests at the border have been the only real indication of the extent of the outbreak in Tanzania: The government hasn’t released data on new cases since April 29. Tanzanian President John Magufuli has said numbers are falling, but a U.S. Embassy statement last week said that many hospitals in the former capital, Dar es Salaam, had been overwhelmed and that the likelihood of contracting the virus in that city was “extremely high.”
Tanzania has taken fewer day-to-day measures to control the virus’s spread than Kenya, which has a dusk-to-dawn curfew, mandatory mask-wearing and localized lockdowns. Kenya has over 1,100 confirmed cases and has been generally praised for the seriousness of its response, despite crackdowns on curfew offenders that have killed more than a dozen people and evictions of slum dwellers, who’ve been left homeless at a time when hygiene and sanitation are paramount.
In Namanga, because contact tracing is done iptvsat only once someone tests positive, the lag in getting results means truckers can rack up hundreds of contacts before knowing their status. And because Kenyan authorities simply turn around infected Tanzanian truck drivers instead of quarantining them at the border, they lose the opportunity to interview them in person about contacts.
“Contacts are traced using phones or physically by community health volunteers, area leaders or security agencies,” said Esther Somoire, who directs the health response in the Kenyan county where Namanga is located. “But it’s complicated, especially at international borders like Namanga.”
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