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More than two-thirds of Africans may have contracted the Covid-19 virus in the past two years, 97 times more than reported infections, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) report released on Thursday.
As of April 6, 11.5 million cases of Covid-19 had been detected and 252,000 deaths linked to this virus recorded on the African continent since the start of the pandemic.
The WHO Africa Region, whose study is still under peer review, believes that the official figures were only a tiny fraction of “thetrue extent of coronavirus infections in Africa“.
The WHO study synthesizes over 150 prevalence studies in Africa between January 2020 and December 2021.
And it concludes that exposure to the virus has increased sharply, from 3% in June 2020 to 65% in September 2021, or 800 million infections. However, only 8.2 million cases were reported during this period.
“This analysis shows that the confirmed cases of Covid-19 currently reported represent only a fraction of the actual number of infections on the continent“, underlined the director general of the WHO for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti in a press release on Thursday.
“This underestimation is happening around the world and it is no surprise that the numbers are particularly high in Africa where there are so many asymptomatic cases.“, she added.
The number of infections worldwide would be “on average 16 times higher than that of confirmed cases“, according to the WHO, which however specifies that “seroprevalence varied greatly within and between countries in Africa“.
With most African populations having limited access to testing, many infections have gone unreported.
If the Covid-19 seemed to shake many regions of the world, Africa appeared relatively spared contrary to initial fears.
According to the WHO, the continent stood out from other regions “for its high number of asymptomatic cases, 67% of cases showing no symptoms of the disease”.
But still according to the organization, the African continent has experienced less serious cases due to the lower proportion of “people with risk factors such as diabetes, hypertension, and other chronic conditions that can lead to a severe form of the disease“.
Furthermore, the youth of the African population “has been another protective factor” for the continent.