COVID-19 in Somalia, 2020 to 2023: cases, deaths and vaccines

In short

Somalia confirmed its first case of COVID-19 on 16 March 2020. The health minister, Fawziya Abikar Nur, said a Somali citizen returning from abroad had tested positive at Mogadishu airport (VOA, 16 March 2020).

By 5 March 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) had recorded 27,334 confirmed cases and 1,361 deaths for Somalia (WHO COVID-19 global data). Counting graves from space suggests many more deaths went unrecorded (see below).

Timeline

• 16 March 2020. First confirmed case. The government suspended international flights (VOA, 16 March 2020).
• 8 April 2020. First death, a 58-year-old man, announced by the health minister (Al Jazeera, 12 April 2020).
• 12 April 2020. Khalif Mumin Tohow, justice minister of Hirshabelle state, died in Mogadishu's Martini hospital, a day after testing positive in Jowhar. It was the second recorded death (Al Jazeera, 12 April 2020).
• 14 June 2020. Al-Shabaab said on its Andalus radio that it had opened a COVID-19 centre in Jilib, about 380 km south of Mogadishu (Al Jazeera, 14 June 2020).
• 15 March 2021. The first 300,000 doses of the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine arrived through COVAX, for health workers and older people with chronic illness (WHO EMRO, March 2021). The first injections were given at Martini hospital the next day (AP, 16 March 2021).

Cases and deaths by year

These are the cases and deaths reported to WHO (WHO COVID-19 global data, file WHO-COVID-19-global-data.csv, last Somalia entry 5 March 2023):

2021 was the deadliest year in the official count, with 1,206 recorded deaths (WHO data).

The deaths that were not counted

A team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), the Somali Disaster Resilience Institute and Catapult Satellite Applications counted new graves in Mogadishu's cemeteries from satellite images taken between January 2017 and September 2020 (Warsame and others, International Journal of Infectious Diseases 113, 2021).

• Burials during the pandemic averaged 1.5 times the pre-pandemic level and peaked at 2.2 times.
• The team estimated 3,200 to 11,800 excess deaths in Mogadishu between January and September 2020.
• The official national count for all of 2020 was 127 deaths (WHO data).
• The study's estimates were lower than the burial records of the Barakaat cemetery committee. The authors concluded there was "considerable underestimation" of COVID-19's health effects in Banadir (Warsame and others 2021).

Vaccines

Figures are WHO data as compiled by Our World in Data, Somalia vaccinations file. The vaccines used included Oxford–AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer–BioNTech, Moderna, Sinopharm and Sinovac (Our World in Data).

Related pages

• Health numbers, 1990 to 2025
• Mogadishu

Sources

• VOA (2020). Somalia confirms first case of coronavirus, 16 March 2020.
• Al Jazeera / Anadolu (2020). Somali state minister dies from coronavirus, 12 April 2020.
• Al Jazeera / Reuters (2020). Al-Shabab sets up coronavirus treatment centre in Somalia, 14 June 2020.
• WHO EMRO (2021). One year of COVID-19 in Somalia and the arrival of first vaccine shipment through COVAX.
• AP (2021). Somalia starts first inoculations with AstraZeneca vaccines, 16 March 2021.
• WHO. COVID-19 dashboard and global data file.
• Warsame, A., Bashiir, F. and others (2021). Excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic: a geospatial and statistical analysis in Mogadishu, Somalia. International Journal of Infectious Diseases 113. doi:10.1016/j.ijid.2021.09.049.
• Our World in Data. COVID-19 vaccinations, Somalia.