Indonesiainside.id, Jakarta–The Covid-19 pandemic has hit Africa again at an alarming rate. While the peak of new Covid-19 infection cases on the continent is expected to occur in about three weeks, quote DW.
The African continent is currently also facing the ferocity of the corona outbreak. Patients filling hospitals and high mortality rates have pushed the continent’s health facilities to the brink of collapse, while vaccination efforts are still far behind.
Previously, countries on the African continent had managed to avoid catastrophic outbreaks of a scale like Brazil or India. But the pandemic is re-emerging at an alarming rate in at least 12 countries.
Meanwhile, new cases of Covid-19 infection on the continent are expected to reach a record peak in about three weeks. Overall, confirmed coronavirus infections in Africa are below 5.3 million cases and around 139,000 deaths among nearly 1.3 billion people, leaving Africa still among the least affected continents in the world after Oceania.
However, “The third wave is accelerating, spreading faster, hitting harder,” the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, warned on Thursday (24/06). “The latest spike in cases could be Africa’s worst.”
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Africa (CDC Africa), John Nkengasong, on Thursday described the third wave as “extremely brutal” and “devastating”. Liberia’s president, George Weah, has also warned this influx will be “much more worrying than a year ago” when his country’s hospitals were overwhelmed with patients.
This third wave of explosions in Africa is a combination of a variety of contributing factors including barriers to immunization, the spread of more infectious virus variants, and low temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere as winter approaches. The Delta variant, which was first detected in India, has so far been reported in 14 African countries. This Delta variant accounts for the vast majority of new cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, according to the WHO.
In South Africa, which accounts for more than 35% of all cases recorded on the continent, doctors are now battling an unprecedented influx of patients. Unlike the previous wave, this time “the hospital system can’t handle it,” said chief physicians’ association Angelique Coetzee.
South Africa’s average new daily infection has increased 15-fold since early April, with hospital admissions increasing by about 60 percent.
Meanwhile in Namibia and Zambia the infection curve also increased steeply. Zambia’s Ministry of Health has reported an “unprecedented” number of Covid-19 deaths piling up in morgues while the Africa CDC said the country was “overwhelmed”.
Similar trends in Uganda, Health Minister Jane Ruth Acheng said highly contagious variants were responsible for this spread. He said that now a large number of young people were also being treated in hospital. Uganda is one of the countries reported to be facing oxygen shortages. However, Acheng denies claims by a civil society group that the country’s oxygen shortage is at 24.5 million liters per day.
Governments across the continent have again tightened restrictions, including a nationwide lockdown in Uganda and tighter curfews in 13 regions of Kenya. At the same time, the continent is also struggling to accelerate the rate of vaccination of its population.
According to the WHO, only about one percent of the population in Africa has been fully vaccinated. This is the lowest ratio in the world. “We are racing behind time, the pandemic is ahead of us. In Africa, we are not victorious in the battle against this virus,” said Nkengasong of CDC Africa. “It’s scary what’s happening on this continent,” he added. (NE)
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