How EGPAF is Stepping Up Against COVID-19

More than 30 years ago the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation was founded to confront the devastating impact of the AIDS pandemic on children, youth, and families. Today we find ourselves on the frontlines of a new pandemic. We’re continuing our work to provide high-quality, uninterrupted HIV/AIDS services for children, youth, and families at health sites around the world—while simultaneously addressing the realities of COVID-19.

Over the last several weeks, EGPAF has been in a period of intense adaptation, demonstrating just how resilient and flexible our team can be in the midst of uncertainty. Across the foundation, we have stepped up in myriad ways, including:

• Expanding a suite of virtual pediatric and adolescent-focused services to provide virtual care for vulnerable children and adolescents living with HIV
• Adjusting ARV service delivery to ensure children, adolescents and adults living with HIV do not miss their medications, while protecting them from COVID19
• Developing training for media to raise awareness about the importance of social distancing
• Expanding virtual learning and telemedicine platforms to enhance infection prevention and control measures at health facilities
• Training laboratory technicians and health workers on safe collection, packaging, and transportation of COVID-19 samples
• Undertaking COVID-19 surveillance activities

Throughout, our colleagues across Uganda, Lesotho, Malawi, Eswatini, and other countries are doing almost all of this in the context of our intensive ongoing day to day work fighting HIV and AIDS. Each day, our health staff collaborate with Ministries of Health, national healthcare workers, and donors to face a complex array of circumstances – deftly navigating new hurdles and rising to the challenge.

To highlight these remarkable, unique experiences, we’ve produced a series of “Stepping up Against COVID-19,” stories featuring EGPAF staff supported by the USAID –RHITES project in Uganda. Dina, a nurse working on the Uganda/DRC border, Eunice, an expert client at Kambuga Hospital, and Ismail and Peter, youth peer counselors in Kabale Regional Referral Hospital, provide a hopeful glimpse into how they are responding to a world that is vastly different than it was just two months ago.

At the same time, EGPAF is working to shed light and drive better understanding and dialogue around the impact of COVID-19 at the global level. Last month we hosted a webinar led by EGPAF Senior HIV Technical Advisor Dr. Lynne Mofenson, “COVID-19, Pregnancy and Mother-to-Child Transmission.” Dr. Mofenson shared research and knowledge to date on COVID-19, and its impact on pregnancy and potential mother-to-child SARS-CoV-2 viral transmission risk.

View our COVID-19 Resource and Research Library here.

Our recently launched comprehensive COVID-19 resource and research library shares the latest research and related materials to help all of us better respond to the pandemic. And leaning upon our advocacy expertise, we participated in a Devex discussion “After the pandemic: How will COVID-19 transform global health and development?” where 21 global health and development thought leaders shared their insights and predictions around long-term consequences of the pandemic and how it might reshape institutions, occupations, and priorities.

We cannot predict what will come next, nor how this pandemic will play out across sub-Saharan Africa and the globe. What we can do—in the middle of so much uncertainty—is to continue our fight for an AIDS-free generation, while rising to the new challenges COVID-19 presents.

This is just the beginning for one pandemic response — but decades of work for another goes on.