Yesterday, December 2, Mauritania’s Minister of the Interior Muhammad Salim Ould Marzuk announced an initial 10-day closure of schools in the country amid concerns about a looming second wave of COVID-19 cases. Other measures include a reduction of personnel in government offices, and a more intensive schedule – meeting every 48 hours – for the ministerial committee charged with tracking the pandemic. Also on December 2, the Health Ministry announced that there had been 153 confirmed cases and 2 deaths during the previous 24 hours.
Per Google’s results, the first peak of COVID-19 in Mauritania came on June 24 with 227 cases in one day. Even by July, the country was mostly out of triple digits, and it was only recently that the numbers began to spike again.
The first lockdown, which ended around July, had significant effects on mobility and the economy. The government provided support and covered some expenses for some of the most vulnerable households in the country, and NGOs stepped in as well, but many households were forced into debt as pastoralism and other sectors suffered. This article, from early November, gives a stark portrait of the pandemic’s secondary effects in the Assaba region of southern Mauritania. I’m pro-lockdown, of course, but one can be pro-lockdown and also worry about all these secondary impacts. With that said, the government’s approach to this nascent second lockdown seems to be sober and, more important, fairly clear and straightforward.
Sahel Blog 
With 181 dead in an epidemic, a country going into lockdown makes sense?
It is unprecedented, and hugely harmful esp to all countries in Africa, which with a few exceptions have been very lightly hit by covid. Never in an epidemic has restricting the movement of healthy people been seen as a working idea.
The measures taken are more harmful than the virus itself by a factor of at least 100.