As the coronavirus infection reached its peak in China, Iran and Italy, western scientists as well as the wife of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, Mrs. Melinda Gates prophesied that dead bodies will fill the streets of Africa due to the expected devastating effect of the coronavirus pandemic on African countries.
The reason for this postulation according to the ‘experts’ at the time was due to the fragile state of basic healthcare on the continent as well as entrenched poverty.
Nine months into the global pandemic and Africa has witnessed the lowest fatality rates in the world while so called advanced and rich countries like the United States and the UK have witnessed a staggering amount of casualty. Nearly 190,000 people have died in the United States while more than 41,000 have died in the UK.
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In South Africa, the worst hit country in Africa, 14,500 people have died from an infected population of 631,000 while Nigeria has a little over a thousand deaths from 53,000 infections.
Unable to explain why the streets of Africa is not flooded with dead bodies, the BBC has blamed the low coronavirus death rates in African countries on Poverty, rather than the efforts of its governments and medical personnel.
According to the BBC report, most African cities are overcrowded and living conditions are so bad that it was projected that the virus would spread very quickly through the population since there was no way people could practice safe social distancing in such living conditions.
The experts are now saying the ‘squalid living conditions’ has worked in favour of African countries rather than against it. According to the head of South Africa’s ministerial advisory team on covid-19, Professor Salim Karim, “Population density is such a key factor. If you don’t have the ability to social distance, the virus spreads.”
According to the experts, it has become baffling that African countries never reached the peak of the pandemic as experienced in Europe and other countries, but have managed to limit casualties and bring down the infection rate.
After presenting various explanations including Africa’s youthful population, and the weather, the experts officially believed that other forms of coronavirus may have already swept through the population, thereby giving most of Africa’s vulnerable population heard immunity from the virus.
They also suggested that early aggressive lock downs in countries like South Africa as well as the provision of oxygen masks may have been important factors in the curbing of the coronavirus.
According to virologist Professor Shabir Madhi, “The protection might be much more intense in highly populated areas, in African settings. It might explain why the majority [on the continent] have asymptomatic or mild infections.”
“It’s a hypothesis. Some level of pre-existing cross-protective immunity… might explain why the epidemic didn’t unfold (the way it did in other parts of the world).”
According to the experts, poverty in Africa pushed people to high population areas where they got infected with common coronavirus including the ones that cause cold and the common flu. This widespread infection is what has provided a certain degree of immunity against coronavirus by Africans.
The general hypotheses is that this immunity has spread among poorer communities in Africa.
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