Bill Gates, a co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (BMGF), says the world still does not have enough data to understand why COVID-19 numbers have not been as high as predicted in Africa.
The American philanthropist who invests heavily in healthcare in Africa said he is, however, happy to have been wrong about COVID-19 rates in Africa.
“One thing I’m happy to have been wrong about, I hope I was wrong is my fear that COVID-19 would run rampant in low-income countries, he wrote in his end of the year note.
“So far, this hasn’t been true because, In most of sub-Saharan Africa, case rates and death rates remain much lower than in the US or Europe.
“The hardest-hit country on the continent is South Africa, but even there the case rate is 40 per cent lower than in the US and the death rate is nearly 50 per cent lower.
According to Gates, more than 1.6 million people have died in the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 75 million cases and tens of trillions of dollars in economic damages.
The US has been the hardest-hit country in the world while South Africa, the continent’s most industrialised nation, has been the most affected in Africa.
Bill Gates had warned early 2020 that Africa could be the worse hit by COVID-19, stating at a conference that the virus would overwhelm health systems in the world’s poorest continent.
Melinda Gates, also a co-chair at BMGF, said the developing world will be hard-hit, she added that she foresees bodies lying around in the street of African countries.
But this has not been the case and the world does not understand why.
Bill Gates said: “we don’t have enough data yet to understand why the numbers aren’t as high as I worried they would get”
Why does it rank so low in Africa? It’s not just the relatively low incidence of COVID-19 there, It’s also because shifting health workers to focus on the coronavirus disrupted efforts to detect and treat HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. As a result, COVID-19 stayed low on the list of health threats, but other problems came roaring back.
“Another reason is that patients are more reluctant to go to clinics for fear they might become infected and that means more severe conditions are going undiagnosed, he said.
Gates said 2020 has been a year of scientific advances and failures, but there is good news coming in 2021.
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