COVID-19 Home Based Management in Poor Resources Settings: A Case of Rwanda

COVID-19 is an infectious disease and can be transmitted from humans to humans through infected air droplets during coughing and sneezing or though contact with contaminated hands or surfaces. By March 01st 2021, World Health Organization (WHO) reported 113,820,168 confirmed cases globally, among them 2,851,062 are from the continent of Africa. Rwanda reported 18,850 confirmed cases, and 261 deaths. Healthcare systems have been burdened by the huge number of COVID-19 cases. Home-Based Care (HBC) was introduced as an alternative option to control the pandemic specifically in poor resource countries. Since December 2020, the number of COVID-19 case and death continued to rise in Rwanda. To handle this issue, the government of Rwanda started promoting the home-based care for asymptomatic people or patients with mild symptoms and they would be followed up by trained Community Health Workers (CHW). The increased number of positive cases is attributed to inadequate compliance to COVID-19 Infectious Prevention and Control (IPC) measures, low socio-economic status, inability to self-isolate due to having small and shared living rooms, food insecurity, lack of familiarity to disinfection procedures for home sanitation, inadequate access to water, weak policy regulating HBC, insufficient PPEs for CHWs, CHW fear of getting infected through HBC, low level of community awareness and perception, comorbidities, poor communication during follow up of HBC patients. Overall, we concluded that HBC has been very crucial in management of COVID-19 as it relieved the burden on health facilities, but more improvement on HBC is needed to be properly applicable in poor resource settings.