NAIROBI, Kenya (PA) – Africa exceeds 100,000 deaths confirmed by COVID-19, as the continent praised its early response The pandemic is now struggling with a dangerous resurgence and medical oxygen it often drains desperately.
“We are more vulnerable than we thought,” John Nkengasong, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Africa, told the Associated Press in an interview reflecting on the pandemic and a stage he called “remarkably painful.” .
He feared that “we are beginning to normalize deaths”, while health workers are overwhelmed.
The continent of 54 nations, with about 1.3 billion people, has barely seen the arrival of large quantities of COVID-19 vaccines, but a variant of the dominant virus in South Africa is already a challenge. to vaccination efforts. However, if doses are available, the continent should be able to vaccinate between 35% and 40% of its population before the end of 2021 and 60% by the end of 2022, Nkengasong said.
On Friday, in a significant evolution, a working group set up by the African Union said that Russia had provided 300 million doses of Sputnik V vaccine in the country, which will be available in May. The AU previously provided 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 through COVID-19, now report a jump in deaths. The CDC in Africa said on Friday that the total number of deaths was 100,294.
Deaths caused by COVID-19 have risen 40 percent in Africa in the past month compared to the previous month, World Health Organization Africa Chief Matshidiso Moeti told reporters last week. It is about 22,000 people who have died in the last four weeks.
Growth is a “tragic warning that health workers and health systems in many African countries are dangerously exaggerated,” she said, and the prevention of severe cases and hospitalizations is crucial.
But the latest trend shows a slowdown. In the week ending Sunday, the continent saw a 28% drop in deaths, the CDC said in Africa on Thursday.
Africa has reached 100,000 confirmed deaths shortly after marking a year since the first coronavirus infection was confirmed on the continent, in Egypt, on February 14, 2020.
But many more people in Africa have died from COVID-19, even though they are not included in the official tax.
South Africa, the continent’s hardest-hit country, saw more than 125,000 deaths in excess of natural causes between May 3 and January 23. Although it is not clear how many were from the virus, there was a “close correspondence of the excess death time with the increase in the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in each province,” said the South African Medical Research Council.
As most African countries do not have the means to track mortality data, it is unclear how many excess deaths have occurred on the continent since the pandemic began.
“We certainly don’t take all deaths into account, especially in the second wave,” Nkengasong told reporters at the CDC Africa last week.
Although the continent does not see a “massive” number of deaths, he said most people in Africa now know someone who died of COVID-19. “People are dying from a lack of basic care,” he said, citing medical oxygen as a critical need.
Twenty-one African countries now have higher-than-global mortality rates, Nkengasong said, including Sudan, Egypt, Liberia, Mali and Zimbabwe. The mortality rate at continent level remains higher than the global average of 2.6%.
“The second wave came with all its might, partly because of this new variant (in South Africa), partly because we created opportunities to spread,” such as holiday parties, said Salim Abdool Karim, COVID’s top adviser. -19 of the South African government. “The virus adapts and improves over time, as it moves progressively to be better adapted.”
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 has been defeated in Tanzania and questions new vaccines without providing evidence, social media in recent days has seen a worrying rise in death notifications by families who say loved ones have died while struggling to breathe. Some otherwise had been healthy.
“He complained about the rapidly declining air in his respiratory system,” a death notice from Dar es Salaam said 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 have been found to have the virus abroad.
Nkengasong told the AP that Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere once said that if Africa is not united, it is doomed.
“If we cannot exercise unity in this period of critical threat to COVID-19, then I do not know what else unity means to the mainland,” Nkengasong said.
Another place where COVID-19 deaths are unaccounted for is the Tigray region of Ethiopia, where a conflict between Ethiopian forces and Tigray entered its fourth month and the health system collapsed. against the background of robbery and artillery attacks. The United Nations has warned of “massive community transmission” of the virus.
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Gerald Imray from Cape Town, South Africa, contributed.
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Follow all the AP pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak.