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Hospitals in many African countries say that admission rates to Covid-19 are declining.
“Based on what we have seen so far, it is unlikely that we are going to see anything on the scale that we are seeing in Europe, both in terms of infections and mortality,” said Rashida Ferrand, a London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Professor who works at the Parirenyatwa Hospital Group in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.
Experts say that some deaths from Covid-19 in Africa are likely being overlooked. Testing rates on the continent of around 1.3 billion people are among the lowest in the world, and many deaths of all kinds go unrecorded.
South Africa saw an additional 17,000 deaths from natural causes between early May and mid-July, 59% more than would normally be expected, according to a July report by the South African Medical Research Council. That suggests that the death toll from Covid-19 could be significantly higher than the official figure, currently more than 16,000, the researchers say. Still, there is broad agreement that Covid-19 death rates have not been as bad as predicted.
Why? Scientists and public health experts cite several possible factors, including the continent’s young population and lessons learned from previous disease outbreaks. African governments also had precious time to prepare due to the relative isolation of many of their citizens from airports and other places where they could come into contact with global travelers.
Some scientists are also exploring the possibility that a tuberculosis vaccine that is routinely administered to children in many African countries could help reduce deaths from Covid-19.
Another theory being considered is whether previous exposure to other coronaviruses, including those that cause the common cold, has provided a degree of resistance in some of the same communities that were once thought to be the most vulnerable.
“There is a lot of circumstantial evidence,” Salim Abdool Karim, a South African infectious disease specialist who has advised the government on Covid-19, told Reuters, “but there is no irrefutable evidence.”
LEARNED LESSONS
The virus reached Africa later than other continents, giving medical staff time to set up field hospitals, stock up on oxygen and ventilators, and learn from improvements in treatment elsewhere.
“We received the gift of time,” said Thumbi Mwangi, a senior researcher at the Institute of Tropical and Infectious Diseases at the University of Nairobi. “We had an amount of preparation that others did not have.”
One reason could be that international travel is limited in many African countries, and traveling within the country can be more difficult than on other continents, Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s regional director for Africa, said at a news conference Thursday.
Governments on the continent have also battled deadly infectious diseases like Ebola, which killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa in 2013-16. So officials took notice when the new coronavirus began to spread rapidly around the world earlier this year.
Many African countries were quick to introduce controls at airports, suspend flights from heavily affected countries, and enforce social distancing measures and the use of masks.
