COVID‑19 Lockdowns: Impact on facility‑based HIV testing and the case for the scaling up of home‑based testing services in Sub‑Saharan Africa

Abstract

In December 2019, China reported the emergence of a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan [1]. By 7 January 2020, the etiology of the pneumonia was attributed to a virus of the coronavirus family, and later on the disease was named coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on 11 February 2020 by the WHO [2, 3]. The symptoms of COVID-19 appear after an average incubation period of 5.2 days [1].