Kenya appears to be literally shooting in the dark in its battle against Covid-19 after it emerged that an unknown new coronavirus strain is behind the current spike in infections and deaths.

Health experts say that the mysterious, more aggressive and lethal variant is silently spreading in communities, but efforts to discover and combat it have been hit by lack of funding.

“As it is, we’re blindly seeing the numbers,” said Prof Omu Anzala, a virologist and a member of National Covid-19 Taskforce.

“This is not just about Kenyans lowering their guards, we have been here before, but the numbers are scary. Only understanding the virus will make us act. We have to allocate money for surveillance.”

He warned of a possibility that Kenyans, even survivors of Covid-19, lacked the immunity to fight the new strain, hence the surge in infections and deaths.

For the last one week, Kenya has been recording new daily infections of above 1,000 cases, with a positivity rate of 17.5 per cent, almost four times the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended level of five per cent.

The average daily death rate has doubled, with last Friday recording the highest single-day count of 28, pointing to a deepening crisis. The surge in deaths and infections has raised fears of the pandemic overrunning the country’s ill-equipped health system, with hospitals in the capital, Nairobi, already facing ICU-bed crisis.