Untrue tales

For more than a year, international media has sounded alarms about the devastating impact that COVID-19 will have in Africa.  Now international media is all wrought-up about the threat that the deltavirus is for Africa but here are the official statistics, (Excerpted on 2021-06-26 from https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality )

	Deaths in COVID per 100.000
Sweden	142.13
United States	183.87
United Kingdom	192.02
	The four countries mentioned in the NYT below
South Africa	102.08
R of Congo	16.69
Zambia	10.72
Kenya	6.76
Uganda	1.87
	Other randomly selected African countries
Zimbabwe	11.75
Senegal	7.8
Somalia	5.02
Rwanda	3.02
Sierra Leone	1.11
Nigeria	1.05
Niger	0.83

Figures for other African countries vary. But they are all in the same ballpark. Of course, these officially accepted figures may be wrong, but, if so, where else does media get its figures from. 

Compare the table to what NYT reports on Africa. We have heard the same narrative for more than a year: “— the battle against the virus has left hospitals stretched, depleted oxygen stocks, and overwhelmed health care workers”. 

The article is quite long, but worth reading in full. It gives a good picture of the conflict Reality-Media. 

“The Delta variant is playing a significant role in a resurgence of the coronavirus in Africa, where the peak of a third wave of new cases is set to surpass previous ones, all at a time when nations are struggling to vaccinate their populations.

The Delta variant, which is highly contagious and was first identified in India, has so far been detected in 13 African countries, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In some of those countries — including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Zambia — the battle against the virus has left hospitals stretched, depleted oxygen stocks, and overwhelmed health care workers.

( Compare this to the narrative about Delta in India in: New Horror Stories are created - https://justidag.info/en/covid-updates/new-horror-stories-are-created/ )

John Nkengasong, director of the Africa C.D.C., said in a news conference on Thursday, “It’s frightening to see what’s happening across the continent.” “This third wave is extremely brutal,” he added. Health experts said it was important to deploy vaccines to beat back the virus. Even as the third wave surges, only about 1 percent of Africa’s population of 1.3 billion people have been fully immunized.

“We have to vaccinate at speed and at scale,” Dr. Nkengasong said. “We are racing against time.”

Africa has now recorded more than five million coronavirus cases and almost 140,000 deaths, despite the continent’s largely having been spared the worst of earlier waves of the pandemic. Since May, Covid cases have risen consistently, and the World Health Organization has predicted that the current wave could be the region’s worst yet.

“The third wave is picking up speed, spreading faster, hitting harder,” Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO.s regional director for Africa, warned in a statement.

The global health organization has detected the Delta variant in most of the samples it has sequenced in the past month. In Uganda, 97 percent of the cases were attributed to the Delta variant, and in Zambia, that version accounted for 77 percent, according to Nicksy Gumede-Moeletsi, a virologist at the WHO’s regional office for Africa.

The WHO said it was deploying experts to the worst-affected nations to monitor and analyze cases of the variant.

The Delta variant has been identified in at least 85 countries and is spreading rapidly among unvaccinated populations, according to the WHO “It’s becoming so dangerous,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organization’s director general, said on Friday, referring to the surge of coronavirus cases and deaths in Africa. “And the difference now is between having a vaccine, and not having a vaccine. The difference is between the haves and the have-nots.”

The overall problem for Africa, experts say, is not demand but supply, as wealthy nations have captured an overwhelming share of the vaccines. High- and upper-middle-income countries have administered 85 percent of vaccine shots, while only 0.3 percent of doses have been administered in low-income countries, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. “There is no allocation if there is no vaccine,” said Dr. Tedros. “What do you share if there is nothing to share?”

In Uganda, where more than a dozen lawmakers have tested positive, the drastic rise in deaths and new infections has pushed President Yoweri Museveni to close schools and ban travel between districts.

In Kenya, hospitals in the western county of Kisumu where the Delta variant was first reported have been stretched, causing the authorities to impose a partial lockdown and extend an overnight curfew. Hospitals in Zambia have also been stressed and new restrictions imposed as the country fights to curb rising new infections — the second-highest on the continent, after South Africa, for the week ending June 20, according to the Africa C.D.C.

“This third wave has come with a severity that many countries were not prepared for,” Dr. Nkengasong of the C.D.C. said.

Health care more broadly is also suffering, including maternal and pediatric services, as hospitals face a strain on resources and as many people avoid them for fear of the virus, said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, the executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital. Dan Levin contributed reporting.— Abdi Latif Dahir”

NYT 2021-06-26

Suffice to say that very little of the contents of this article and of the references are based on the official statistics shown above.