NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – Africa surpasses 100,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 as the continent is praised for its early response after the pandemic is now struggling with a dangerous revival and medical oxygen often runs desperately short.
“We are more vulnerable than we thought,” the director of the African Center for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, told The Associated Press in an interview about the pandemic and a milestone he described as “remarkably painful”. mentioned.
He was concerned that “our deaths are beginning to normalize” while health workers are being overwhelmed.
The continent of 54 countries of about 1.3 billion people has barely seen the advent of large-scale supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, but a variant of the virus that prevails in South Africa is already a challenge to vaccination attempts. However, if doses are available, the continent should be able to vaccinate 35% to 40% of its population by the end of 2021 and 60% by the end of 2022, Nkengasong said.
In a key development on Friday, a task force created by the African Union said Russia had offered 300 million doses of Sputnik V vaccine in the country to be available in May. The AU previously secured 270 million doses of 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 COVID-19 deaths are now reporting a jump in deaths. The CDC of Africa said on Friday that the total death toll was 100,294.
The deaths due to COVID-19 have increased by 40% in Africa in the past month compared to the previous month, the World Health Organization’s head of Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, told reporters last week. More than 22,000 people have died in the past four weeks.
The increase is a ‘tragic warning that health workers and health systems in many countries in Africa are dangerously overweight’, she said. It is crucial to prevent serious cases and hospitalizations.
But the latest trend shows a slowdown. In the week ending on Sunday, the continent experienced a 28% drop in deaths, Africa CDC said on Thursday.
Africa has reached 100,000 confirmed deaths shortly after a year since the first coronavirus infection on the mainland in Egypt was confirmed on 14 February 2020.
But many more people in Africa have died from COVID-19, even though they have not been included in the official toll.
South Africa, the country hardest hit on the continent, saw more than 125,000 deaths due to natural causes between 3 May and 23. Although it is not clear how much of the virus was present, there was a “close correlation between the time of the excess deaths and the increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases in each province,” the South African Medical Research Council said. said.
As most countries in Africa do not have the means to detect mortality, it is not clear how many excess deaths have occurred across the continent since the pandemic began.
“We are certainly not counting all the deaths, especially not in the second wave,” Africa CDC Nkengasong told reporters last week.
While the continent does not see a ‘massive’ number of deaths, it has claimed that most people in Africa now know someone who died of COVID-19. “People are dying because of a lack of basic care,” he said, citing medical oxygen as a critical need.
21 countries in Africa now have death rates higher than the world average, Nkengasong said, including Sudan, Egypt, Liberia, Mali and Zimbabwe. The death rate worldwide remains higher than the global average, at 2.6%.
“The second wave has come with full force, partly because of this new variant (in South Africa), partly because we have created far-reaching opportunities”, such as holiday parties, said Salim Abdool Karim, the largest COVID-19 adviser for the South African government, said. “The virus adapts and gets better over time because it gradually mutates to adapt better.”
In the unusual case of Tanzania, no one knows how many deaths, or even infections, have occurred since the country of about 60 million people stopped updating its number of cases in April.
But while populist President John Magufuli claims that COVID-19 was defeated in Tanzania and questions the new vaccines without providing evidence, social media has seen a worrying increase in death notices in recent days by families saying loved ones are dead while struggling to breathe. Some were otherwise healthy.
“He complained about the rapidly declining air in his respiratory system,” one death notice in Dar es Salaam said this month.
Tanzania is now one of eight African countries with the more contagious variant of the virus first found in South Africa, according to the WHO, citing travelers from Tanzania who have been discovered to have the variant overseas.
Nkengasong told the AP that Julius Nyerere, the influential first president of Tanzania, had once declared that Africa was doomed if Africa was not united.
“If we cannot exercise unity in this period of critical threat from COVID-19, I do not know what unity means for the continent,” Nkengasong said.
Another place where COVID-19 deaths are being counted is the Tigray region of Ethiopia, where a conflict between Ethiopian and Tigray forces entered a fourth month and the health system collapsed. amid looting and artillery attacks. The United Nations has warned against a massive transmission of the virus by the community.
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Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa, contributed.
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