Tues 9th August 2022, Election Day
The most obvious factor for the low death rates is the population age structure. Across multiple countries the risk of dying of COVID-19 for those aged 80 years or more is around a hundred times that of people in their twenties.This can best be appreciated with a specific example. As of September 30th, the UK had reported 41,980 COVID-19 specific deaths while Kenya, by contrast, had reported 691. The population of the UK is around 66 million with a median age of 40 compared with Kenya’s population of 51 million with a median age of 20 years.Corrected for population size the death toll in Kenya would have been expected to be around 32,000. However if one also corrects for population structure (assumes that the age specific death rates in the UK apply to the population structure of Kenya), we would expect around 5,000 deaths. There is still a big difference between 700 and 5,000; what might account for the remaining gap?
Other suggestions include the possibility of pre-existing protective immune responses due either to previous exposure to other pathogens or to BCG vaccination, a vaccine against tuberculosis provided at birth in most African countries. A large analysis – which involved 55 countries, representing 63% of the world’s population – showed significant correlations between increasing BCG coverage at a young age and better outcomes of COVID-19.
Genetic factors may also be important. A recently described haplotype (group of genes) associated with increased risk of severity and present in 30% of south Asian genomes and 8% of Europeans is almost absent in Africa.The role of these and other factors – such as potential differences in social structures or mobility – are subject to ongoing investigation.
The people who are Covid was supposed to kill across Africa were killed kitambo by hunger, diarrhea, cancer, diabetes, road accidents, malaria, HIV
Topic: COVID-19 in Africa - An Interesting Perspective (Read 1967 times)