While the official figure reports 11.5 million people infected with Covid-19 and 252,000 deaths in Africa since the start of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that these figures only represent a tiny fraction of the true extent of coronavirus infections on the continent.
In a study on the prevalence of the virus between January 2020 and December 2021, the WHO highlights shortcomings in the number of cases detected, which would be 97 times higher than those indicated. Thus, in all, more than two-thirds of Africans could have been infected.
Evolution of daily cases of Covid-19 according to the continents
The World In Data
For example, exposure to Covid-19 between June 2020 and September 2021 increased from 3% to 65%, or 800 million infections. Yet only 8.2 million cases have been reported. The understatement, unique to the whole world, is “particularly high in Africa”, in the words of the WHO’s director general for the continent, Matshidiso Moeti. It must be said that most African populations have restricted access to tests.
Disparities between the countries of the continent
If the African continent seemed to suffer less than other regions of the world, it is because of “its high number of asymptomatic cases”, reaching 67% of cases. The WHO also indicates that the youth of the African population and the lower number of people with diabetes or hypertension have limited the development of serious forms of the disease.
But the great difference in the number of cases within different African countries tends to show that many patients have not been detected. Thus, in January 2021, while South Africa recorded 14,880 positive cases, Gabon only recorded… 3.
A strong inequality in the face of vaccination
More than 13 billion doses have been produced since the start of the pandemic, according to the International Federation of the Pharmaceutical Industry, of which 11 billion have been administered. Despite these plethoric doses, the world population is still very unequally vaccinated, an inequity which has notably facilitated the appearance of variants, such as Omicron.
If nearly 80% of the French population is fully vaccinated, this is the case for only 15% of the African population, according to the site of the British University of Oxford. On average, 42% of the inhabitants of the 92 poor countries of the Gavi World Alliance, the international organization in charge of immunization issues, have received their primary anti-Covid vaccination, compared to 58% worldwide.