Covid-19 barely exists in Africa, so little that it’s seldom even talked about according to those living there. But the real question is, why?
With a massive population of almost 1.3 billion people, Africa is the world’s second most-populated continent. Trailing only Asia, and it’s also the world’s poorest.
Despite the massive gap in resources, Africa has much less access to vaccines than places like the Americas and Western Europe. However despite all of that, the continent has experienced the second-lowest number of deaths fro the virus of any other of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) six designated regions.
Scientists had warned the COVID-19 pandemic would be a disaster for Africa, with its poor health care systems and underdeveloped infrastructure. But so far, the continent has done better than many developed regions. https://t.co/PBJKE8S6Nk
— AP Africa (@AP_Africa) November 19, 2021
Nearly 152,000 Africans have died of Covid-19 since the global pandemic according to what numbers have been reported.
The Western Pacific region has seen just 136,267 deaths, but otherwise Africa has had the best pandemic outcome in the entire world.
In the Americas more than 2.3 million people have died from the virus according to numbers, which are flawed in many areas, but let’s just go with those for the sake of it. In Europe they’re reporting 1.5 million deaths.
“I think there’s a different cultural approach in Africa, where these countries have approached COVID with a sense of humility because they’ve experienced things like Ebola, polio and malaria,” Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, told the AP.
“It’s not always about how much money you have or how sophisticated your hospitals are,” said Christian Happi, director of the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria.
Experts have blamed everything from poor reporting to the fact that the median age in Africa is around 18 years old, but one things for sure, they hate the fact that they can’t have a pandemic in this region.
Perhaps it could be the fact that the majority of the continent uses Hydroxychloroquine like candy because it’s a preventative treatment for Malaria, which we know now from many studies it also helps with Covid-19. Just a thought, right?
What’s most stunning to medical experts is that Africa is doing this with limited access to vaccines. Less than 6% of the population is vaccinated, according to the AP.
