New York
Nearly a quarter of a billion people across Africa will catch coronavirus during the first year of the pandemic, the World Health Organization has said in a new study.
The study, published in the British Medical Journal, also warns that 190,000 Africans could die of COVID-19 in the first 12 months of the pandemic unless urgent action is taken.
The total number of predicted infections equals about one-quarter of the one billion people in the 47 countries which make up the WHO’s Africa region, or 250 million people, and does not include some north African countries like Libya, Egypt and Sudan.
Between 4.6m to 5.5m Africans will need to be hospitalised, according to the modelling. These hospitalisations mean the continent’s fragile health care systems will quickly be overwhelmed as the virus spreads.
Researchers warn that the outbreak will divert precious funds away from major health issues which already kill hundreds of thousands of Africans every year, like AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and malnutrition.
So far Africa has been spared the worst of the pandemic. The region has about 0.77 per cent of worldwide cases and 0.43 per cent of deaths, even though it represents 13.7 per cent of the global population.
According to the latest figures from the WHO, Africa has around 47,000 cases of Covid-19 and 1,488 deaths.
Many have attributed the low death rate in Africa, to the continent’s young population. The median age in Africa is 19.4 compared to 45.4 in Italy.
However, experts say that the low number of tests in Africa is almost certainly hiding the true scale of the crisis.
South Africa, the continent’s most industrialised nation, is currently carrying out some 16,000 tests a day. This is many times more than any other African nation. However, this high figure is still a fraction of what many developed countries are conducting.—AFP
