Trying to Solve a Covid Mystery: Africa’s Low Mortality Rates

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While health surveillance is weak, he acknowledged that Sierra Leoneans had the last, horrific experience of Ebola that killed 4,000 people here in 2014-16. Since then, he said, citizens have been on the alert for an infectious agent that could kill people in their communities. He said that if this were the case, they would not continue to interfere.

As part of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Covid task force, and part of the research team tracking excess deaths in South Africa, Dr. Salim Abdool Karim believes that the continent-wide death rate is probably consistent with that of his country. There is no reason why Gambians or Ethiopians should be less vulnerable to COVID than South Africans, he said.

But he also said it was clear that not many people came to the hospital with respiratory distress. He said the younger population is clearly an important factor, with some seniors dying from strokes and other Covid-related causes not being identified as coronavirus deaths. Many never go to hospital and their deaths are not recorded. But others don’t get sick at rates seen elsewhere, and that’s a mystery to be solved.

D., head of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto and leading the analysis of causes of death in Sierra Leone. “This is extremely relevant to fundamental things like vaccine development and treatment,” Prabhat Jha said.

Dr. Researchers working with Jha are using new methods, such as looking for any increases in revenue from obituaries on radio stations in Sierra Leone towns over the past two years to see if deaths will rise unnoticed, but Dr. It was clear that there was no tide of hopelessly sick people.

Some organizations working on the Covid vaccine effort say lower morbidity and mortality rates should prompt policy rethinking. John Johnson, vaccine consultant for Doctors Without Borders, said that vaccinating 70 percent of Africans last year makes sense given that vaccines can provide long-term immunity and make it possible to end the transmission of Covid-19. But now that it’s clear that protection has been reduced, collective immunity no longer seems achievable. Therefore, better use of resources in a place like Sierra Leone would arguably be an immunization strategy focused on protecting the most vulnerable.

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