UPDATE 1-Africa's window to curb coronavirus "narrowing every day" -WHO

(Updates with Kenya confirming first coronavirus death)
NAIROBI, March 26 (Reuters) - About half of the countries in
sub-Saharan Africa still have a "narrowing" opportunity to curb
the spread of coronavirus in the local population, a World
Health Organisation regional official said on Thursday.
The virus has multiplied across Africa more slowly than in
Asia or Europe, but more than 40 nations on the continent have
now reported a total of 2,850 with 73 fatalities, according to a
Reuters tally.
On Thursday, Kenya confirmed the death of its first patient
over coronavirus, government spokesman Cyrus Oguna told
Reuters. "It has been a very dramatic evolution," Matshidiso Moeti,
the WHO Africa head, told a media teleconference earlier on
Thursday.
Governments across the region needed to invest their efforts
in aggressively tracing all those people who have been in
contact with imported cases, in order to isolate them and
prevent transmission of the disease locally.
"Countries need to work on this containment while preparing
for a possible, broader expansion of the virus," she said.
The effort needs to be accompanied by public education
campaigns to ensure people are maintaining physical distances,
something that could help limit the spread of the virus, and
should complement other measures like halting passenger flights.
South Africa has ordered a lockdown of its population for
three weeks while Kenya has imposed a night-time curfew to
prevent the disease from spreading. "We still have a window... it is narrowing every day as data
on the geographic spread to more and more countries tell us,"
Moeti said. John Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centres for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), a health body of the African
Union, said African leaders were preparing to engage with their
wealthier counterparts to secure vital supplies like respirators
and ventilators in case infection rates worsen.
Nkengasong told the same teleconference that countries with
advanced industrial bases like South Africa, Egypt and Morocco
could be used to produce such equipment if needed.