Opinions of Saturday, 30 October 2021
Columnist: Joel Savage
When the coronavirus hit the world about two years ago, many including the World Health Organization initially had thought the disease’s impact will be disastrous on Africa.
The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control have reasons to believe that because pandemics always have a disastrous impact on the African continent. Whether natural or man-made, Africa doesn’t escape it.
By the end of 2020, just over 2.5 million cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed in Africa. This is only 3.5% of the total number of detected cases in the world.
The victims of the disease on the continent with a population of 1.3 billion people were about 60 thousand cases.
For Africa, even the most pessimistic forecasts of the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control did not come true.
For the majority of Africans, COVID-19 is still a virtual threat because of which, nevertheless, the population continues to be subjected to strict quarantines.
Africa has a history pertaining to diseases. As the world’s second-largest continent after Asia, the African continent has experienced unstable government, political unrest, corruption, and other diseases that continued to hamper the developments on the continent.
HIV-Aids, a disease initially blamed on monkeys brought from the Philippines to the United States of America, by the World Health Organization, had seriously attacked both original Africans on the continent of Africa and African-Americans simultaneously.
By the time the world became alert over the disease, Aids has killed millions and infected people worldwide, thus; many were expecting to be the same when the coronavirus emerged. They have a reason, in Africa, medical facilities are poor and the economy is not well developed.
While Europe and the United States follow restrictive measures for the spread of COVID-19, the death toll keeps rising, while fewer deaths were occurring in Africa. Why was it some kind of genetically determined resistance to the disease or just a miracle?
During the outbreak of the disease, countries that registered high infections and deaths were South Africa, Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco. The low cases might be because of geographical reasons but haven’t been well explained.
It has also been argued that the low morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 in African countries were also attributed to the climate, younger populations, and weak transport infrastructure on the continent, a similar situation typical in Third World countries, not just in Africa.
Even though the coronavirus has sharply risen in many developed countries that of African countries is still relatively low with a few reports of mass deaths on the continent.
Did God or scientific reasons save Africa? Whatever the reason, the continent continues to obey the rules to avoid the spread of the disease.