Responding to COVID-19: Global Accountability Report — March to May 2020

7 min readNov 17, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented health crisis of global scale. Since early 2020, it has put tremendous strain on healthcare systems, disrupted economies, and halted large parts of social life in many countries around the world.

In a race against the fast spreading virus and rapidly increasing patient numbers, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) scaled-up our global response from early January, committing substantial resources to both developing dedicated COVID-19 projects and maintaining essential healthcare in its existing programmes.

Since then, our teams have responded to the pandemic in countries all over the world. We have now released the first of a series of reports, Responding to COVID-19: Global accountability report 1, which covers our activities from March to May 2020.

In countries where robust health systems exist, MSF’s operational focus is in offering our expertise in handling complex emergencies and advising on public health approaches, taking pressure off overstretched health facilities, ensuring healthcare workers are protected, and caring for vulnerable populations. In conflict zones, in humanitarian crises and in low-resource settings with fragile health systems, our priority is to ensure medical teams are able to provide live-saving care and safely manage potential COVID-19 patients.

MSF’s focus also is on maintaining or adapting crucial medical activities such as treatment for HIV and tuberculosis patients, measles vaccination campaigns, malaria prevention, and the fight against other infectious disease outbreaks such as cholera or Ebola.

In March, MSF created the COVID-19 Crisis Fund, to raise urgently-needed funds for both our dedicated COVID-19 programmes and to mitigate potential severe impact on existing health services. The fund seeks to raise €150 million, which will be used to cover direct and indirect costs related to COVID-19 over the course of 2020 and 2021. By late July, just over €99 million had been raised.

This report is the first in a series of accountability reports and operational snapshots offering insight into:

MSF’s global COVID-19 response;
highlighting activities and outcomes;
documenting expenditures; and
shedding light on challenges faced in accessing and supplying communities with essential medicines and supplies.
Covering the period from March to May 2020 and tracing some earlier activities back to the beginning of the year, this report provides an account of how MSF projects around the globe have shifted gears to accelerate outbreak preparedness and adapt their projects in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (see Chapter 4). The fifth chapter looks at key data from MSF activities in Europe– the epicentre of the pandemic from March to late May. Chapter six then discusses MSF’s approach in managing the major staffing, logistics, supply, and financial challenges of responding to COVID-19.

The second report on MSF‘s global COVID-19 response is scheduled for publication in October and will cover activities from June to August. A third report will be released in early 2021, reviewing the remaining months of the year.

A new MSF report shows that new drugs and testing for tuberculosis aren’t getting to people quickly enough.
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe impact on services such as testing for TB, which is the world’s deadliest infectious disease.
MSF calls on governments to bring their TB policies in line with WHO guidelines and increase TB testing and treatment.
GENEVA — As the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to derail the global response to tuberculosis (TB), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) called on governments to accelerate testing, treatment, and prevention for TB. MSF also called on donors to provide the financial support needed to ensure increased access to new medical tools for diagnosing and treating millions of people with the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

A report released today by MSF and the Stop TB Partnership, Step Up for TB, surveys 37 high TB-burden countries. The report shows that critical medical innovations are reaching far fewer people who urgently need them, because many countries continue to lag behind in getting their national policies in line with new World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines.

Step up for TB report 2020
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“Instead of stepping up for TB, we are at risk of slipping back due to COVID-19,” said Sharonann Lynch, Senior TB Policy Advisor for MSF’s Access Campaign. “We cannot stress enough how urgent it is now for governments and donors to intensify their efforts so that critical medical innovations and tools reach people with TB. We finally have better drugs and tests to tackle and prevent this extremely infectious yet curable disease, so it’s both mind-boggling and unacceptable that they’re still not being used to save as many lives as possible.”

While reporting on the severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on TB services, WHO revealed a sharp drop in the number of people diagnosed. Besides needing to catch up to maintain continuity of existing TB services, it advised countries to adopt and roll out better testing policies and practices.

Countries continue to fall short on rolling out up-to-date testing policies that can assist in reaching nearly 3 million people still being missed. As highlighted in the report, a whopping 85 per cent of countries surveyed still do not use the lifesaving point-of-care urinary TB LAM test for routine diagnosis of TB in people living with HIV, as recommended by WHO.

Coronavirus caseload in Bangladesh stood at 381,275 on Tuesday with the detection of 1,537 new cases in 24 hours until morning.

Health authorities also announced 22 more deaths in the last 24 hours, taking the total fatalities to 5,577.

With 1,537 patients recovering during this period, the total recoveries from coronavirus rose to 295,873.

The fatality rate in Bangladesh is 1.46 percent, said a handoput of Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).

The daily infection rate on Tuesday was recorded 11.13 percent upon testing 13,815 samples in 109 RT-PCR testing labs.

Bangladesh reported its first cases on March 8. The number of cases reached the 300,000-mark on August 26. The first death was reported on March 18 and the death toll exceeded 5,000 on Sept 22.

So far, 20,98,037 samples have been tested and 18.17 percent of them have turned out to be positive.

The recovery rate has climbed to 77.6 percent in Bangladesh, the health authorities said.

Bangladesh is seeing 2,238.76 infections, 1,737.30 recoveries and 32.75 deaths per million.

Of the total victims, 4,292 are men and 1,285 are women. Of the latest 22 victims, 17 are aged above 50 years.

So far, 2,844 people have died in Dhaka division, 1,122 in Chattogram, 359 in Rajshahi, 449 in Khulna, 193 in Barishal, 238 in Sylhet, 254 in Rangpur and 118 in Mymensingh.

Across the country, 12,501 people are now in isolation and 40,576 in quarantine.

Global situation

The global confirmed Covid-19 cases surpassed 37.7 million as of Tuesday morning, according to the latest tally from John Hopkins University (JHU).

The deaths from the coronavirus have been recorded 1,078, 868, according to the JHU data.

Besides, more than 26 million patients recovered from coronavirus.

The US has registered over 214,000 deaths and more than 7.7 million cases — both the world’s highest.

India registered 66,732 new cases over the past 24 hours, and its Covid-19 tally rose to 7,120,538 on Monday.

The death toll reached 109,150 with 816 deaths since Sunday morning, the ministry’s data showed.

The third-worst-hit country Brazil has counted 5,103,408 cases and 150,689 deaths.

Meanwhile, a new Australian study suggested SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, can remain infectious for 28 days in a lab, a significantly longer time than previously thought.

The chief of the World Health Organization (WHO) has termed herd immunity against Covid-19 “scientifically and ethically problematic.”

The virus, which causes respiratory infection Covid-19, was first detected in the city of Wuhan, China, in late 2019. The outbreak spread quickly across the globe in the first months of 2020 and declared a global pandemic by the WHO on March 11.

Responding to COVID-19: Global Accountability Report — March to May 2020

Written by Quang Thiện Nguyễn