NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – Africa has exceeded 100,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 as the continent praised for its quick response for the pandemic now struggles with a dangerous resurgence and medicinal oxygen it is often desperately short.
“We are more vulnerable than we thought,” John Nkengasong, director of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Associated Press in an interview reflecting on the pandemic and a milestone he called “extremely painful”.
He feared that “we are beginning to normalize deaths”, while health professionals are overwhelmed.
The 54-nation continent of around 1.3 billion people has barely seen the arrival of large-scale supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, but a variant of the dominant virus in South Africa already poses a challenge vaccination efforts. Still, if doses are available, the continent should be able to vaccinate 35% to 40% of its population before the end of 2021 and 60% by the end of 2022, said Nkengasong.
In a significant development on Friday, an African Union task force said that Russia offered 300 million doses of the country’s Sputnik V vaccine, which will be available in May. AU previously secured 270 million doses from AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.
Health officials, who breathed a sigh of relief last year, when African countries did not see a large number of deaths from COVID-19, now report an increase in the number of fatalities. Africa’s CDC on Friday said the total deaths are 100,294.
Deaths from COVID-19 increased 40% in Africa last month compared to the previous month, the head of the World Health Organization for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, told reporters last week. There are over 22,000 people dying in the past four weeks.
The increase is a “tragic warning that health professionals and health systems in many countries in Africa are dangerously overburdened,” she said, and preventing serious cases and hospitalizations is crucial.
But the most recent trend shows a slowdown. In the week ending on Sunday, the continent saw a 28% reduction in deaths, Africa’s CDC said on Thursday.
Africa reached 100,000 confirmed deaths shortly after marking one year since the first coronavirus infection was confirmed on the continent, in Egypt, on February 14, 2020.
However, many more people across Africa died of COVID-19, although they are not included in the official number of victims.
South Africa, the most affected country on the continent, had more than 125,000 excess deaths from natural causes between May 3 and January 23. While it was unclear how many there were because of the virus, there was “a close correspondence at the time of excess deaths with the increase in confirmed cases of COVID-19 in each province,” said the South African Medical Research Council.
Since most countries in Africa lack the means to track mortality data, it is unclear how many excess deaths have occurred on the continent since the pandemic began.
“We are definitely not counting all the deaths, especially in the second wave,” Nkengasong of the Africa CDC told reporters last week.
Although the continent is not seeing a “massive” death toll, he said that most people in Africa now know someone who died of COVID-19. “People are dying for lack of basic care,” he said, citing medical oxygen as a critical need.
Twenty-one countries in Africa now have higher lethality rates than the global average, said Nkengasong, including Sudan, Egypt, Liberia, Mali and Zimbabwe. The case mortality rate across the continent remains above the global average of 2.6%.
“The second wave came in full force, partly because of this new variant (in South Africa), partly because we created overspread opportunities,” like holiday parties, said Salim Abdool Karim, COVID’s top advisor. 19 for the South African government. “The virus adapts and improves over time because it is undergoing progressive mutations to adapt better.”
In the unusual case of Tanzania, no one knows how many deaths, or even infections, have occurred since the country of some 60 million people stopped updating its number of cases in April.
But while populist President John Magufuli claims that COVID-19 has been defeated in Tanzania and questions new vaccines without offering evidence, social media in the past few days has seen a worrying rise in death warnings from families saying loved ones died while struggling to breathe. Otherwise, some were healthy.
“He complained about the rapidly decreasing air in his respiratory system,” said a death notice in Dar es Salaam this month.
Tanzania is now one of eight African countries with the most infectious variant of the virus that was first found in South Africa, according to the WHO, citing travelers from Tanzania who were discovered with the variant abroad.
Nkengasong told the AP that Tanzania’s influential first president, Julius Nyerere, once declared that if Africa is not united, it is doomed.
“If we cannot exercise unity in this period of critical COVID-19 threat, then I don’t know what else unity means for the continent,” said Nkengasong.
Another place where COVID-19 deaths are not counted is in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, where a conflict between Ethiopian and Tigray forces entered the fourth month and the health system collapsed. amid looting and artillery attacks. The United Nations has warned of the “massive transmission of the community” of the virus.
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Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa, contributed.
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