Senegal re-opens mosques & churches despite increase in COVID-19 cases

Senegalese President Macky Sall has on Monday announced that he shall relax Coronavirus restrictions in his country.

Churches and mosques as a result of this new directive are allowed to start operation.

Sall ordered places of worship closed in March and imposed a dawn-to-dusk curfew.

Since then, the daily pace of new cases has picked up, 177 on Monday from a previous high of 104, with increasing community transmission in hotspots such as the holy city of Touba.

Senegal has recorded 2,105 coronavirus cases in total, including 21 deaths.

According to Reuters, Sall, like other leaders in West Africa, has confronted public pressure to find more sustainable ways to balance public health with economic realities in the face of an epidemic that the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned could drag on across Africa for years.

“In the best of cases, COVID-19 will continue to circulate in the country until the month of August, or even September,” Sall said in an address to the nation. “In this new phase that will last not a few weeks but three or four months, we need to learn to live in the presence of the virus.”

Sall also said the 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew would be shortened by one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening and that weekly markets could re-open.

Several other West African governments, including Burkina Faso and Ghana, have announced a similar easing of restrictions this month, while calling on their citizens to wear masks and practice social distancing.