Staying One Step Ahead of the Pandemic

ADF STAFF

Before COVID-19 hit Sub-Saharan Africa in late February, Dr. John Nkengasong arranged an emergency meeting of health ministers in Ethiopia.

“I have never been this serious in my life,” the director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) told the Financial Times. “They came from Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa. Everybody was there.”

The same month, the Africa CDC acquired its first 10,000 testing kits and coordinated with the Institut Pasteur in Dakar, Senegal, to train lab technicians to conduct tests. By March, 42 African countries were able to test for COVID-19, according to a report by the Institute for Defense Analyses.

“I don’t know any continent that rallied that quickly,” Nkengasong said.

The seriousness with which African leaders took the threat of COVID-19 and the speed of their response are just two ways the world can learn from how Africa has handled the pandemic.

Although an April United Nations report projected “between 300,000 and 3.3 million African people could lose their lives,” the numbers of infections and deaths have been far fewer.

As of December 6, nearly a year since the novel coronavirus emerged in China, there have been 2,261,589 confirmed cases and 53,853 deaths on the continent, according to the Africa CDC.

With more than 1.3 billion people, Africa makes up 17% of the global population. By October, however, it had recorded only 3.5% of COVID-19 deaths.

International experts are studying how Africa has avoided its predicted disaster. Here are a few theories:

• Youthful population: According to U.N. statistics, Africa has the youngest population in the world with a median age of 19.4. About 3% of people are over 65. Senior homes, where the virus has devastated other parts of the world, are rare on the continent. The elderly are more likely to live in rural areas, where social distancing is easier.
• Health care systems: Africa has plenty of experience with contagious diseases such as Ebola, HIV, tuberculosis and polio. The Democratic Republic of the Congo had its biggest Ebola outbreak when COVID-19 was spreading worldwide. Many of the practices and resources used to fight these diseases have been successfully repurposed for COVID-19.
• Travel: Because Africans tend to travel less than people in other parts of the world, the disease does not spread as quickly across long distances.
• Warm climate: In South Africa, which has nearly half the continent’s total cases and deaths, COVID-19 raged while winter swept across the Southern Hemisphere and declined significantly as the temperature rose.

Interventions, innovations and multilateral cooperation also have saved lives.

Officials quickly implemented lockdowns, curfews, emergency declarations and border closings. The tiny, landlocked kingdom of Lesotho shut down before recording its first cases. In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa banned alcohol and tobacco.

Rwanda earned international acclaim for using drones and robots to assist with testing, contact tracing and restrictions enforcement.

Nkengasong attributed the low case numbers to a “joint continental effort.”

At a time of scarce resources, the African Union and businesses launched an online purchasing platform to concentrate negotiating power and buy directly from manufacturers. AU governments shop for ventilators, test kits and masks —some now sourced from Africa.

“It’s the only part of the world I’m aware of that actually built a supply chain,” Gayle Smith, former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told The Associated Press. “Africa is doing a lot of things right the rest of the world isn’t.

“It’s a great story and one that needs to be told.”