OUAGADOUGOU – For nearly a year, Ousseni Yanogo thought he was doing everything he could to protect himself from the coronavirus.
The 63-year-old retired gendarme diligently wore a mask, washed his hands and stayed a safe distance from other adults. When he held hands with his granddaughter to sing happy birthday when she turned 6, he never imagined he'd find himself fighting to survive in a coronavirus isolation ward weeks later. “I didn’t know contact (with children) was that dangerous, otherwise I wouldn’t have allowed the party to be organized,” Yanogo said while seated on his bed at the Bogodogo Medical Teaching Hospital in Ouagadougou, the capital of the West African country of roughly 20 million.