Rwanda’s COVID 19 fight boosted by new referral centre

According to local media reports, landlocked Rwanda’s Ministry of Health has launched a new Covid-19 treatment facility with a capacity of admitting up to 140 patients in its well-equipped Intensive Care Unit (ICU).

It is located in the capital, Kigali, in a new District Hospital that will be the national Covid-19 referral centre.

This new Nyarugenge District Hospital has 300 beds of which 140 are equipped with oxygen and ventilator machines.

The new facility will considerably boost the country’s Covid-19 case management, according to a statement from Rwanda Biomedical Center (RBC).

“The facility is expected to considerably improve Covid-19 case management. It offers the highest standard of oxygen therapy and its ICU capacity can admit 136 patients,” reads the RBC statement.

In early January alone, it is reported, there were 36 Covid-19 patients under intensive care and, according to the RBC, efforts geared at establishing more Covid-19 ICU treatment centers in all the country’s four provinces are ongoing.

Rwanda uses both institutional and home-based management of Covid-19 cases. Home-based care (HBC) is for patients who are asymptomatic, those with mild symptoms, and not be above 65 years of age.

Lately, Rwanda’s Covid-19 situation has raised concern, specifically from December 2020.

On January 11, 2021, the Covid-19 fatality rate in the country rose from 1.2 to 1.3 percent as four new deaths were recorded that day. This took the total number of human deaths caused by the virus to 124.

Kigali is also making efforts to improve citizens’ access to testing services. The Ministry of Health recently cleared 42 private clinics to start testing people, using antigen rapid tests. In these private clinics, a single test costs Rwf10,000.