Thread 1/12: Proud to have worked with @WHO (especially @NoorAbdisalan & @PAlonsoMalaria), @MalariaAtlas, & @hannah_c_slater on this important report, modeling how COVID-19 disruptions to essential malaria services could undo 20 years of gains we’ve made. https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/23-04-2020-who-urges-countries-to-move-quickly-to-save-lives-from-malaria-in-sub-saharan-africa

The bottom line: every effort must be made to maintain net distributions & access to treatment. 2/12

26 countries are scheduled for net distribution campaigns this year. If those don’t happen as planned, the situation is grave even if we are able to maintain access to ACTs – 15M more cases in sub-Saharan Africa and up to 30k more deaths, the majority in children under 5. 3/12

Without access to treatment, which could happen if case management services or supply chains are disrupted, the situation is even worse – if ACT access is reduced by 50%, the number of deaths is projected to double. 4/12

When combined, disruptions to both nets and ACT access have catastrophic results. If both of these essential services are disrupted by 75%, we are potentially looking at 45M additional cases across Africa, and nearly 400k additional deaths. 5/12

Previous outbreaks and natural disasters have shown time and time again that when fragile healthcare systems are disrupted, malaria cases and deaths can and will surge. At this time, it’s critical that countries do whatever they can to preserve essential malaria services. 6/12

The Global Malaria Programme @WHO recently published guidance to support malaria programs in maintaining services safely during COVID-19, & the malaria community is coming together to ensure continued access to nets, essential medicines, & services. 7/12 https://www.who.int/publications-detail/covid-19-operational-guidance-for-maintaining-essential-health-services-during-an-outbreak

This is the time to work together, and I’m very grateful to the malaria modelers who we’ve been working with on this report and other aspects of our response. The @MalariaAtlas team did a superb job of quickly generating results for all sub-Saharan Africa. 8/12

We were also able to quickly tap into the expertise of the modelers at @PATHtweets, @SwissTPH, @IDMOD_ORG, & @NorthwesternU who are working together on modeling country-level malaria epidemiology for the High Burden, High Impact project. 9/12

Understanding COVID-19’s impact on malaria services also requires understanding COVID-19, and the hard work done by modeling teams around the world, including @IHME_UW and @MRC_Outbreak has been very helpful. 10/12

And none of this would have been possible without good underlying data, whether it’s describing malaria epidemiology, mosquito populations, campaign status, or climate, so thanks to everyone involved in the fight against malaria whose work has got us to where we are today. 11/12

Malaria delenda est! 12/12

Some great media coverage of the work already, which I'll be tweeting out too.

The link to the full report PDF is a little tricky to find on the WHO press release site - you can find the whole thing, with country-by-country data here: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331845/9789240004641-eng.pdf