NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – Africa has exceeded 100,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 while the continent has been praised for its early response to the pandemic is now grappling with a dangerous resurgence and medical oxygen often falls desperately short.
“We are more vulnerable than we thought,” Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director John Nkengasong told The Associated Press in an interview reflecting on the pandemic and a milestone he called “remarkably painful.”
He was concerned that “we’re starting to normalize deaths,” while health workers are overwhelmed.
The 54-nation continent of about 1.3 billion people has barely seen the arrival of large-scale supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, but a variant of the South African-dominant virus is already posing a challenge to vaccination efforts. But 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 major development on Friday, a task force created by the African Union said Russia has offered 300 million doses of the country’s Sputnik V vaccine, which will be available in May. The AU previously received 270 million doses from AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.
Health officials who breathed relief last year when African countries failed to see a massive number of COVID-19 deaths are now reporting a jump in fatalities. The Africa CDC said on Friday that the total number of deaths is 100,294.
Deaths from COVID-19 are up 40% in Africa in the past month compared to the previous month, World Health Organization chief Matshidiso Moeti told reporters last week. That’s more than 22,000 people who 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 overloaded,” she said, and prevention of serious cases and hospitalizations is crucial.
But the latest trend is showing a slowdown. In the week ending Sunday, the continent saw a 28% drop in deaths, the Africa CDC said 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 across Africa, many more people have died from COVID-19, even though they are not included in the official toll collection.
South Africa, the most affected country on the continent, saw more than 125,000 additional deaths from natural causes between May 3 and January 23. the additional deaths with the increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases in every province, ”said the South African Medical Research Council.
Since most countries in Africa do not have the resources to track mortality data, it is not clear how many additional deaths have occurred on the continent since the start of the pandemic.
“We are certainly not counting all deaths, especially in the second wave,” Nkengasong of the CDC of Africa told reporters last week.
Although the continent does not have a “huge” number of deaths, he claimed that most people in Africa now know someone who has died from COVID-19. “People are dying from a lack of basic care,” he said, citing medical oxygen as an essential need.
Twenty-one countries in Africa now have death rates higher than the global average, Nkengasong said, including Sudan, Egypt, Liberia, Mali and Zimbabwe. The death rate for cases across the continent remains higher than 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 super-spreading opportunities,” such as holiday parties, said Salim Abdool Karim, the South African government’s top COVID-19 adviser. “The virus adapts and gets better over time as it mutates gradually to become better adapted.”
In the unusual case of Tanzania, no one knows how many deaths or even infections have occurred since the country with about 60 million people stopped updating the number in April.
But while populist president John Magufuli claims COVID-19 has been defeated in Tanzania and questions the new vaccines Without providing evidence, social media has seen a worrying rise in recent days in obituaries by families saying loved ones died while struggling to breathe. Some had otherwise been healthy.
“He was complaining about the rapidly diminishing air in his respiratory system,” an obituary said in Dar es Salaam 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 were discovered to have the variant abroad.
Nkengasong told the AP that Tanzania’s influential first president, Julius Nyerere, once stated that if Africa is not united, it is doomed.
“If we cannot exercise unity during this period of critical threat from COVID-19, then I don’t know what else unity means for the continent,” said Nkengasong.
Another place where COVID-19 deaths are not counted is the Tigray region of Ethiopia, where a conflict between Ethiopian and Tigray forces has started a fourth month and the health system has collapsed amid looting and artillery attacks. The United Nations has warned of “massive community transmission of the virus”.
Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa, contributed.
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