Rio de Janeiro – Eight months into the Covid-19 pandemic, with 33.5 million cases and 1 million people dead from the disease, the African continent stands out with relatively low infection and death rates. After weekly infection rates peaked in late July, Africa was expected to take the place of the Americas as the pandemic’s next epicenter, but cases have been declining ever since.
With a population of 1.2 billion, the continent has seen some 1.5 million cases of Covid-19, according to the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC). That is less than a third of the total for Brazil, whose population is six times smaller at 210 million. Africa had 125 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, while Brazil had 2,258, as per Ministry of Health numbers.
Africa registered just under 36,000 deaths from Covid-19. That is just over the amount in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, whose population is 46 million. Brazil had 67.6 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, with a 3% mortality rate. Africa saw 3 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants and a mortality rate of 2.4%.
Fundação Oswaldo Cruz International Health Relations Center (Cris-Fiocruz) researcher Augusto Paulo Silva ascribes low infection rates in Africa to at least four factors. The first one is epidemic response capacity. “One of the most plausible explanations is that many African countries had already experienced pandemics. For some it’s cholera, for others Ebola, which had been active in the Democratic Republic of the Congo until recently. There was an Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea in 2014. Those major epidemics caused many African countries to have emergency plans in place.”
Another explanation, he said, is carryover immunity from other diseases. A third reason could be the fact that the African population is younger than the world average. “The fourth explanation is that many countries aren’t as connected and in touch with other countries. If you look at infection rates per country, they are highest in the most developed ones like South Africa, Egypt and Algeria.”
Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
