As Virus Resurges in Africa, Doctors Fear the Worst Is Yet to Come - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/world/africa/africa-coronavirus-pandemic.html
Some Africans view Covid-19 as an affliction of Westerners and wealthy travelers. In a classroom in a Somali community displaced by drought and war, a fourth grader readily identified the United States as having the most cases. “Donald Trump was Covid-19-positive,” he said.Sarah Oyangi, 35, an apartment complex manager who lives in what she refers to as a slum in Nairobi, said friends told her they weren’t worried because the virus “is for wazungu and the rich,” using a Swahili word meaning European or white people. “It’s not our disease.”Dr. Nkengasong said he was very worried about how long it would take to vaccinate enough people on the continent to protect the most vulnerable from unwitting spreaders.
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A global effort to help low- and middle-income countries aims for 20 percent coverage at most by the end of 2021, a third of what African leaders say is needed. “The U.S. is not going to target 20 percent of its population. Europe is not going to target 20 percent of its population,” he said. “Why do you think in Africa we should?”The first case on the continent was detected on Feb. 14 in a foreign traveler from China to Egypt. Two weeks later, Nigeria discovered that a contractor who had flown in from Milan was ill. In South Africa, the earliest cases involved a half-dozen or so people who had gone skiing in Italy. The W.H.O.’s regional director for Africa reported on March 19 that infected travelers from Europe had come into 27 or 28 countries. Early on in sub-Saharan Africa, only South Africa and Senegal had supplies to perform diagnostic tests, but with aid, every country on the continent was later able to do some testing.
As the virus overwhelmed the West’s advanced health systems, governments across Africa, with some notable exceptions, imposed stringent curfews and lockdowns. Some countries had only a few cases at the time; Zimbabwe declared a national disaster without having announced one.“They went into shutdown because we were terribly ill prepared,” Dr. Nkengasong said. But that desperate action may have put Africa ahead of the curve in fighting the virus, instead of behind it, as the United States and Europe found themselves.
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