Coronavirus in Africa

AlJ link

There are 183,474 confirmed infections and 81,367 recoveries, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Experts warn fragile healthcare systems in many African countries could be overwhelmed in the face of a severe outbreak of COVID-19, the highly infectious respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.

if you believe that the number of "confirmed" cases is the same as the actual number of cases, then you are a fool.

most of the cases are in Egypt and South Africa. Ah, but how many are dying in villages or in the neighborhoods and aren't getting a diagnosis? Especially if they are elderly (and in Africa, elderly means 50 years old) or have HIV.

One thing I haven't read much about: is the use of Chloroquin being done as prevention? Are people still taking Chloroquin for malaria prevention (even when I worked in Africa, Falciparum malaria was becoming resistant).

And what about those taking retroviral drugs for HIV? Are they dying at a higher rate (HIV affects T cells, which are the cells that fight Covid) or are the retroviral drugs protecting people?

Just wondering.

Black Lives matter (but not if they live in Africa)

StrategyPage summarizes the latest news from Central Africa.

Ebola is back, alas.

 While Ebola is one of the most lethal epidemic diseases ever encountered, a much less lethal visitor from China has recently shown up in Congo. The covid19 has, in three months, inflicted around 3,400 confirmed cases of covid19 virus in Congo and 72 confirmed deaths. That’s 37 per million people and 0.8 deaths per million. For all of Africa (including North Africa) there have been 120 cases per million and 3.4 deaths per million people. That’s far lower than anywhere else...

the only problem: the numbers are not accurate you know.

 There may be more cases in Congo but the country has little or no access to modern medical care and people regularly die of undiagnosed afflictions. Since most of these involve a fever, caused by the immune system trying to fight off some kind of infection, people call many fatal conditions an unspecified fever, and such fatal fevers are common.

Sigh. This is probably true here in the Philippines too. One of our neighbors had a fever and shortness of breath but died in the hospital of a "heart attack". I am pretty sure that he had Covid, but they didn't test him. I have no proof, but maybe because if a known case was found in that (private) hospital then no one would go their for routine illnesses.