NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – Africa has surpassed 100,000 deaths confirmed by COVID-19 as the continent praises its first response in the pandemic it is now struggling with a dangerous resurgence and medical oxygen it is often cut short desperately.
“We are more vulnerable than we thought,” the director of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, told The Associated Press in an interview reflecting on the pandemic and a milestone he described as “remarkably painful “.
He worried that “we are starting to normalize deaths,” while health workers are overwhelmed.
The continent of 54 nations of about 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 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 by the end of 2021 and 60% by the end of 2022, Nkengasong said.
On Friday, in a significant development, a working group set up by the African Union said Russia has offered 300 million doses of the country’s Sputnik V vaccine, which will be available in May. Previously, the AU insured 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 deaths from COVID-19 are reporting a jump in fatalities. The CDC in Africa said Friday that the overall death toll is 100,294.
Deaths from COVID-19 rose 40 percent in Africa over the past month compared to the previous month, Africa’s head of the World Health Organization, Matshidiso Moeti, told reporters last week . More than 22,000 people have died in the last four weeks.
The increase is a “tragic warning that health workers and health systems in many African countries are overly dangerous,” he said, and preventing serious cases and hospitalizations is critical.
But the latest trend shows a slowdown. The week ended Sunday, the continent saw a 28% drop in deaths, Africa’s CDC said on Thursday.
Africa has reached 100,000 confirmed deaths shortly after one year since the first coronavirus infection was confirmed on the continent, in Egypt, on February 14, 2020.
But there are many more people in Africa who have died of COVID-19, even though they are not included in the official toll.
South Africa, the continent’s hardest-hit country, recorded more than 125,000 excess deaths from natural causes between May 3 and January 23. the excess of deaths with the increase in confirmed cases of COVID-19 in each province, ”the South African Council for Medical Research said.
Because most African countries do not have the means to track mortality data, it is unclear how many excess deaths have occurred across the continent since the pandemic began.
“We definitely don’t account for all the deaths, especially in the second wave,” Nkengasong told Africa’s CDC last week.
Although the continent does not see a “massive” death toll, he said most people in Africa now know someone who has died of COVID-19. “People die because of a lack of basic care,” he said, citing medical oxygen as a critical need.
Twenty-one African countries currently have higher-than-global mortality rates, according to Nkengasong, including Sudan, Egypt, Liberia, Mali and Zimbabwe. The death rate across the continent remains above the world average of 2.6%.
“The second wave came in full force, partly because of this new variant (in South Africa), partly because we created opportunities for overstretching,” such as holiday parties, said Salim Abdool Karim, the main advisor to COVID-19 of the South African government. “The virus adapts and improves over time because it is mutating progressively to adapt better.”
In the unusual case of Tanzania, no one knows how many deaths, not 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 COVID-19 has been defeated in Tanzania and questions new vaccines without offering evidence, social media in recent days has experienced a worrying rise in death notices by families who say loved ones died while struggling to breathe. On the other hand, some had been healthy.
“He complained about the rapid decrease in air in the respiratory system,” a death notice said this month in Dar es Salaam.
Tanzania is now one of eight African countries with the most infectious variant of the virus first found in South Africa, according to the WHO, citing travelers from Tanzania who were found to have 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 threat of COVID-19, then I do not know what unity means for the mainland,” Nkengasong said.
Another place where deaths from COVID-19 are not counted is the Tigray region in Ethiopia, where a conflict between Ethiopian and Tigray forces has entered a fourth month and the health system has collapsed. amid looting and artillery attacks. The United Nations has warned of the “mass community transmission” of the virus.
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Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa, contributed.
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