Covid and Africa: or when mortality is low if the number of vaccinations is low
I admit that I could close the article with two graphs and 50 words, they are so clear, but I have to put some fat. Despite not advanced health systems, Africa has largely found a very limited number of cases and a very limited Covid mortality, with the exception of South Africa.
The African continent also has some of the lowest vaccination rates in the world, yet mortality also appears to be very low. Here is a graph that correlates the percentage of vaccinated people (on the abscissa) and the deaths per million (on the ordinates)
A situation that would be interesting to study, even if currently the "experts" are groping around, looking for possible explanations.
Some sources, for example, insist that the low total deaths are just an artifact of incomplete reporting on covid infections and that "the problem is the lack of good qualitative data." Too bad some researchers, such as Richard Wamai of Northeastern University, dismiss the claim that it is just case reporting and say that "local systems for reporting deaths in Africa make it difficult to hide COVID-19 victims." In an article for the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Wamai and his co-authors conclude, "There is no evidence that COVID-19 mortality data is reported less accurately in Africa than elsewhere" and "While the true The picture of infections and mortality on the continent has yet to fully emerge, the quality of the data for other diseases, such as HIV / AIDS, indicates that Africa has the capacity to collect and report valid disease surveillance data ”.
Therefore the data are not so distorted and the excesses of mortality, a rather clear index, seem under control or due to other causes that can be explained very simply.
In any case, the World Health Organization reports that covid deaths in Africa represent only 2.9% of covid deaths, while the African population is 16% of the global total. The total covid in Africa could double or triple and Africa would fare much better than Europe and the Americas.
Wamai et al. also note that at this point "it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 has already been widely spread in Africa … If so, it is likely that a widespread infection also results in widespread natural immunity ".
In other words, the continuing claims by health officials, both in Africa and elsewhere, that mass death is around the corner with the "next wave" seem increasingly implausible.
It seems increasingly likely that the lack of covid mortality in Africa is not due to a data problem or to a situation in which covid has been "contained" until now. So why is Africa doing so much better than the wealthy West?
Surely the fact that the population gets younger is very important. The elderly suffer from a much higher mortality. Then, if we were damned conspiracy theorists, we could point out that certain anti-parasitic and anti-viral drugs are much more used in Africa in a legitimate way, such as Ivermectin, but I would like to point out a second graph, the one with which we close the article:
On the abscissa we have the percentage of the population obese, on the ordinates the deaths per million inhabitants. It may be a coincidence, but wouldn't it have been better, instead of the lockdown, a good campaign for physical activity and proper eating?
So, also to get better …
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The article Covid and Africa: or when mortality is low if the number of vaccinations is low comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/covid-e-africa-ovvero-quando-la-mortalita-va-a-braccetto-con-il-basso-tasso-di-vaccinazione/ on Thu, 25 Nov 2021 13:30:25 +0000.