A new report from South Africa shows a “big discrepancy” in the number of coronavirus-related deaths and the number of “excess deaths” from natural causes as COVID-19 cases increase across the country.
The South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) released a report on Wednesday showing 17,000 excess deaths from May 6 to July 14, while 6,000 coronavirus-related deaths were reported.
SAMRC President Glenda Gray said the excess deaths could be due to other diseases like tuberculosis or HIV being left untreated as resources pool to fight the coronavirus.
“The numbers have shown a steady increase: in the second week of July, there were 59 percent more deaths from natural causes than expected,” the SAMRC report said, comparing data from the past two years.
IN SOUTH AFRICA, CORONAVIRUSES INCREASE WHILE OXYGEN SUPPLIES RUN LOW IN THE EPICENTER
And some health experts believe South Africans may be avoiding health facilities, due to fear surrounding the pandemic, which topped 400,000 cases in the country on Thursday.
South Africa represents more than half of the reported cases for the African continent, and has become the fifth largest number of cases in the world, behind the USA, which has reached more than 4 million cases, Brazil with almost 2.3 million confirmed cases, India surpassing 1.2 million cases and Russia with almost 800,000 reported cases, according to data from John Hopkins University.
“The coronavirus storm has really come,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said Thursday, adding that schools will temporarily “take a break” for a month.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said Thursday that more than 10,000 health workers have been infected with the disease across the continent and that adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) for health personnel is urgently needed. .
THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC IN AFRICA IS ‘ACCELERATING’, WHO IS WARNING As cases increase
“The growth we are seeing in COVID-19 cases in Africa is putting increasing pressure on health services across the continent,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, in a released Thursday. “This has very real consequences for the people who work in them, and there is no more sobering example of this than the increasing number of infections of health workers.”
The WHO also reported that health workers represent 10 percent of the number of people infected worldwide.
Healthcare centers across the continent have been found to lack the necessary infrastructure to adequately prevent the spread of infection, and less than eight percent of facilities had isolation capabilities.
The WHO has trained more than 50,000 health workers across Africa in “infection prevention and control” and plans to train 200,000 more, he said.
Moeti said 41 million items of personal protective equipment (PPE) are being shipped from China to aid in the lack of protective equipment.
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Africa has reported almost 769,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus, but health experts fear that this number is distorted due to a lack of transparent reporting and evidence among the 54 African nations.
So far, 7.2 million tests have been conducted on a continent with more than 1.3 billion people.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
