Trying to solve a COVID mystery: Africa's low death rates.
A wedding in the village of Kamakuyor in northern Sierra Leone on Feb. 15, 2022. During the pandemic, the village's district has recorded just 11 COVID-19 cases and no deaths. 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.
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, HIV, tuberculosis and malnutrition was seen as kindling for disaster.
Plenty of other hypotheses have been floated. High temperatures and the fact that much of life is spent outdoors could be preventing spread. Or the low population density in many areas, or limited public transportation infrastructure. Perhaps exposure to other pathogens, including coronaviruses and deadly infections such as Lassa fever and Ebola, has somehow offered protection.
The one sub-Saharan country where almost every death is counted is South Africa. And it’s clear from the data that COVID has killed a great many people in that country, far more than the reported virus deaths. Excess mortality data show that between May 2020 and September 2021, some 250,000 more people died from natural causes than was predicted for that time period, based on the pattern in previous years. Surges in death rates match those in COVID cases, suggesting the virus was the culprit.
The Economist, which has been tracking excess deaths throughout the pandemic, shows similar rates of death across Africa. Sondre Solstad, who runs the Africa model, said that there had been between 1 million and 2.9 million excess deaths on the continent during the pandemic.But many scientists tracking the pandemic on the ground disagree. It’s not possible that hundreds of thousands or even millions of COVID deaths could have gone unnoticed, they say.
Dr. Salim Abdool Karim, who is on the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID task force and who was part of the research team tracking excess deaths in South Africa, believes the death toll continentwide is probably consistent with that of his country. There is simply no reason that Gambians or Ethiopians would be less vulnerable to COVID than South Africans, he said.
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