NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – Africa has surpassed 100,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 as the continent praised for its early response to the pandemic now struggling with dangerous resuscitation and medical oxygen often running with brief urgency.
“We are more vulnerable than we thought,” the director of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, told the Associated Press in an interview reflecting on the pandemic and the milestone. it is “very painful. ”
He was concerned that “we are beginning to normalize deaths,” as health workers recover.
A 54-nation continent of about 1.3 billion people has barely seen a massive supply of COVID-19 vaccines, but variation of South Africa’s largest virus is already a challenge. to vaccination efforts. However, if doses are available, the continent should be able to vaccinate 35% to 40% of their population by the end of 2021 and 60% by the end of 2022, Nkengasong said.
In a major development on Friday, an action group created by the African Union said Russia has offered 300 million doses of the country’s Sputnik V vaccine, to be available in May. The AU previously received 270 million doses from AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.
Health officials who breathed relief last year when African countries did not see a large number of COVID-19 deaths now report a jump in deaths. CDC Africa said on Friday that there are 100,294 total deaths.
Deaths from COVID-19 rose 40% in Africa last month compared to the previous month, World Health Organization chief Matshidiso Moeti told reporters last week. That is more than 22,000 deaths in the last four weeks.
The increase is a “compelling warning that health workers and health systems in many African countries are being dangerously overwhelmed,” she said, and prevention of hard cases and hospitalization is crucial.
But the latest trend shows a slowdown. In the week ending Sunday, the continent saw a 28% drop in deaths, CDC Africa said Thursday.
Africa has reached 100,000 confirmed deaths shortly after marking the anniversary of the first diagnosis of coronavirus infection on the continent, in Egypt on February 14, 2020.
But many more people across Africa have died from COVID-19, even though they are not included in the official tax.
South Africa, the hardest country on the continent, saw more than 125,000 more deaths from natural causes between May 3 and January 23. Although it is not clear how many came from the virus, there was “close contact at the time of further death with the increases in confirmed COVID-19 cases in every continent,” the African Medical Examination Council said. -South.
With most countries in Africa not having a way to track mortality data, it is unclear how many deaths have occurred across the continent since the outbreak began.
“We certainly do not count all deaths, especially in the second wave,” Nkengasong CDC Africa told reporters last week.
Although the continent does not see an “awful” number of deaths, he said most people in Africa now know someone who died with COVID-19. “People are dying from a lack of basic care,” he said, citing medical oxygen as an essential need.
Twenty countries in Africa now have case death rates that are above the global average, Nkengasong said, including Sudan, Egypt, Liberia, Mali and Zimbabwe. Continental mortality rates across the continent remain higher than the global average at 2.6%.
“The second wave came at full capacity, partly because of this new variation (in South Africa), partly because we created superstitious opportunities” such as holiday parties, said Salim Abdool Karim, chief COVID-19 adviser to the South African government. “The virus changes and gets better over time as it gradually moves towards better adaptation.”
In the unusual case of Tanzania, no one knows how many deaths, or even diseases, have occurred since the country of about 60 million people stopped updating the number of cases in April.
But while populist President John Magufuli maintains that COVID-19 has been defeated in Tanzania and questions the new vaccines without offering evidence, social media in the past few days has seen a worrying rise in death notifications with families claiming loved ones died while struggling to breathe. Some had been healthy.
“He complained about rapidly depleting air in his respiratory system,” said one death knell in Dar es Salaam this month.
Tanzania is now one of eight African countries with the most contagious variant of the virus first detected in South Africa, according to the WHO, citing Tanzanian travelers found to they had the opposite abroad.
Nkengasong told the AP that Tanzania’s first victorious president Julius Nyerere, once named if Africa is not united, was a disgrace.
“If we cannot use unity in this time of imminent threat of COVID-19, I do not know what another unity means for the continent,” Nkengasong said.
Another place where COVID-19 deaths go unnoticed is the Tigray region in Ethiopia, where conflict between Ethiopian and Tigray forces has entered its fourth month and the health system has collapsed. among looting and artillery attacks. The United Nations has warned of a “massive community outbreak” of the virus.
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Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa, added.
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