Reopening country’s economy to be determined by county preparedness: Uhuru

President Uhuru Kenyatta has told Governors that the decision to re-open the country's economy will be determined by the level of preparedness across the counties in response to coronavirus infections.

Uhuru spoke on Thursday from State House during a virtual meeting of the national and county governments coordinating summit.

"County readiness to respond to new imported cases of infection will largely determine our national readiness to re-open the country as a whole. I say this because the nation is the total of all the 47 counties. If the counties have met the necessary thresholds, then the nation will be ready to re-open," Uhuru said.

The meeting was also attended by Deputy President William Ruto and representatives of religious and business sectors.

During the meeting, Health CS Mutahi Kagwe and his Education counterpart George Magoha informed the president on the progress report on the roll out of the minimum Covid-19 response measures required ahead of the re-opening of the economy was presented.

The progress report was presented by Kakamega Governor Wycliffe Oparanya who is also the current Chairperson of the Council of Governors.

Oparanya said that counties had attained a total of 6,898 isolation beds against the national target of 30,500 units.

The governor said 12 counties had met the 300 per county isolation beds threshold while 34 devolved units were on course to meet the target within the month.

He added that a total of 16,914 health workers had been trained on virus management among them 59,449 community health volunteers.

Oparanya also reported that 36 counties have a cumulative sum of 343 ICU beds while 28 counties have a total of 337 ventilators.

He said the CoG working with the Ministry of Health and partners had developed a guideline on home-based Covid-19 management which is being rolled out.

Governor Oparanya thanked the President for his frontline role in the fight against Covid-19 saying the Head of State's intervention had helped speed up response preparedness by counties.

"Through your directive that allowed County Governments to procure non-pharmaceuticals from other agencies, Counties have enhanced their response measures," Oparanya said.

Oparanya said CoG supports the gradual re-opening of the economy subject to the setting up of a strict regime of Covid-19 containment protocols for businesses, places of worship and inter-county travel.

"We propose that a multi-agency approach is applied on disease containment through improvement of testing capacity; contact tracing and enforcing the social distancing mechanisms.

"The reopening of the economy will have a County specific context. This will consider the County specific sector priorities and the health system ability to cope,"  Oparanya advised.

Kagwe said Covid-19 infections in the country were on the rise and advised against re-opening of the economy before the response preparedness threshold agreed upon is fully met.

He said countries that had rushed to re-open their economies without having proper Covid-9 containment protocols in place were experiencing an upsurge in new infections.

The Health CS urged counties to speed up the recruitment of the 8000 health workers under the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) program so as to boost the country's Covid-19 response capability.

DP Ruto supported the President's proposal for progressive reopening of economy and urged counties to speed up the implementation of Covid-19 containment measures.