On Thursday, President Museveni announced that he would take a two-day “forced leave” and delegated his work to Prime Minister Robinah Nabanja. The announcement came after he tested positive for Covid-19 on Wednesday.

Museveni, who has been in power since 1986, said that he has been “very cautious” but recently had to give up facemasks due to allergic reactions in his throat and eyes. He started experiencing mild flu-like symptoms on Tuesday but ignored them and went about his business, meeting people and working on his State of the Nation Address.

He then went on to explain that he noticed some flu-like symptoms in his nostrils and called his doctors to take samples and rule out Covid-19. After three samples were taken, it was confirmed that he had contracted the virus. A rapid and one of the PCR tests came back negative, but the other PCR was positive.

As a precaution, he traveled in a separate car back from Kololo as the samples were taken back to reconfirm. Meanwhile, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has cautioned against letting the guard down with the pandemic.

While last month the WHO’s independent emergency committee on the Covid crisis agreed that it no longer merited the organization’s highest alert level, Tedros estimated that the virus had killed “at least 20 million” people.
He argued that since the virus is still changing, it remains a significant danger and called on countries not to dismantle the systems they have built to manage it.