Trying to Solve a Covid Mystery: Africa's Low Death Rates (NYT)

[SoonerPride]

I searched the site and didn't see this article posted.

The coronavirus was expected to devastate the continent, but higher-income and better-prepared countries appear to have fared far worse.

KAMAKWIE, Sierra Leone — There are no Covid fears here.

The district’s Covid-19 response center has registered just 11 cases since the start of the pandemic, and no deaths. At the regional hospital, the wards are packed — with malaria patients. The door to the Covid isolation ward is bolted shut and overgrown with weeds. People cram together for weddings, soccer matches, concerts, with no masks in sight.

Sierra Leone, a nation of eight million on the coast of Western Africa, feels like a land inexplicably spared as a plague passed overhead. What has happened — or hasn’t happened — here and in much of sub-Saharan Africa is a great mystery of the pandemic.

The low rate of coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths in West and Central Africa is the focus of a debate that has divided scientists on the continent and beyond. Have the sick or dead simply not been counted? If Covid has in fact done less damage here, why is that? If it has been just as vicious, how have we missed it?

The answers “are relevant not just to us, but have implications for the greater public good,” said Austin Demby, Sierra Leone’s health minister, in an interview in Freetown, the capital.

The assertion that Covid isn’t as big a threat in Africa has sparked debate about whether the African Union’s push to vaccinate 70 percent of Africans against the virus this year is the best use of health care resources, given that the devastation from other pathogens, such as malaria, appears to be much higher.

In the first months of the pandemic, there was fear that Covid might eviscerate Africa, tearing through countries with health systems as weak as Sierra Leone’s, where there are just three doctors for every 100,000 people, according to the World Health Organization. The high prevalence of malaria, H.I.V., tuberculosis and malnutrition was seen as kindling for disaster.

That has not happened. The first iteration of the virus that raced around the world had comparatively minimal impact here. The Beta variant ravaged South Africa, as did Delta and Omicron, yet much of the rest of the continent did not record similar death tolls.

more at the link

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/health/covid-africa-deaths.html

[jimfields33]

1. I think lack of travel from the population has a part in it

If it never arrives, it won’t come there.

[SoonerPride]

2. The article said covid antibodies have been found in 2/3 of the population

So Covid is there, it is just not lethal.

Studies that tested blood samples for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the official name for the virus that causes Covid, show that about two-thirds of the population in most sub-Saharan countries do indeed have those antibodies. Since only 14 percent of the population has received any kind of Covid vaccination, the antibodies are overwhelmingly from infection.

[jimfields33]

3. Oh. Thank you. I guess it is a mystery.

[Tree Lady]

5. I wonder if it could be their diet

Part of the problem with covid is it causes inflammation that goes crazy and most of the world eats food that creates it.

[PatSeg]

8. Or perhaps their repeated exposure to so many virulent diseases

has given them much stronger immune systems? I agree, their diet certainly could be a possibility. It definitely is a mystery worth exploring.

[SoonerPride]

11. This is my (uneducated) supposition as well.

Exposure to many more diseases and germs has given the average African a more robust immune system in general making them more able to fight Covid 19.

They are still getting infected at high rates like the rest of the globe but not getting as sick from it.

[PatSeg]

12. People in Africa deal with many diseases

that most Westerners never even come in contact with. It is possible that COVID is something their immune systems can handle better than we can.

Hey, some day when an expert presents this hypothesis, we can give ourselves a pat on the back !

[SoonerPride]

13. Indeed

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

14. Perhaps more to the point, there would be far fewer people there

with what is coyly called "co-morbidities" in other countries, especially the U.S.

First off, how many obese and morbidly obese people do they have? How many with other chronic diseases? Far fewer I'd say.

I'd also want to know how good their numbers are, are they really reporting all of their cases and deaths?

[PatSeg]

15. That is a good point as well

[uponit7771]

6. WOW !!!

[Johnny2X2X]

4. I wonder if Vitamin D was a key

Sunnier climates saw less severe cases. Also, obesity and overweightness is not as big of an issue on some African countries.

Whatever the case, I am very glad Africa wasn't as devastated from Covid.

I think the studies of the data are going to be very revealing as time goes on. For the US, we obviously got hammered for a long time, but then Omicron washed through and probably eased it some because it gave more people some natural ability to fight the disease. The data will likely showed we were right with restrictions for a while, then eased them too quickly with Delta, and then were correct not to re-implement them with Omicron.

[uponit7771]

7. +1,

[Mariana]

9. The median age in Africa is 19.7 years.

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/africa-population/

The median age in Europe is 42.5 years. The median age in North America is 38.6 years.

I suspect this is a factor.

[SoonerPride]

10. The article mentions median age as a factor, however India is similarly young and had a huge death

toll.

Some speculation has focused on the relative youth of Africans. Their median age is 19 years, compared with 43 in Europe and 38 in the United States. Nearly two-thirds of the population in sub-Saharan Africa is under 25, and only 3 percent is 65 or older. That means far fewer people, comparatively, have lived long enough to develop the health issues (cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease and cancer) that can sharply increase the risk of severe disease and death from Covid. Young people infected by the coronavirus are often asymptomatic, which could account for the low number of reported cases.

Since Covid tore through South and Southeast Asia last year, it has become harder to accept these theories. After all, the population of India is young, too (with a median age of 28), and temperatures in the country are also relatively high. But researchers have found that the Delta variant caused millions of deaths in India, far more than the 400,000 officially reported. And rates of infection with malaria and other coronaviruses are high in places, including India, that have also seen high Covid fatality rates.