African countries have had time to prepare for for covid-19. Governments have enforced lockdowns early, and boosted testing capacity
people are not worried at all,” says Lesedi Kgasago, a student from Soweto, Johannesburg. Among his friends “corona” is seen either as something that afflicts white people or a fiction. When life is a struggle it is hard to worry about a threat you cannot see.
It could be worse. Most rich countries have struggled to respond to the outbreak. African ones have fewer medics and less kit. Social distancing is far harder in overcrowded slums. Lockdowns could increase poverty and hunger. Nor do most African countries have the money to tide people and companies over.
Experience in dealing with other infectious diseases may prove useful. Roughly one in three deaths in Africa every year is from an infectious or parasitic disease, compared with one in 50 in Europe. Recent Ebola outbreaks, across west Africa in 2014-16 and in eastern Congo in 2018-20, have taught policymakers vital lessons.
The underlying health of Africans may not help either. Doctors do not know if the more than 25m Africans infected withare at greater risk from covid-19. Some speculate that anti-retroviral drugs may help fight the new virus, though early studies suggest otherwise. Even if this were the case, notes Denis Chopera, a Durban-based virologist, only about 60% of South Africans withThe burden on health-care systems from covid-19 could impede treatment of other diseases.
African governments face practical as well as spiritual obstacles. The state’s ability to enforce social distancing and lockdowns is questionable in cities, where two in every five Africans live. More than half of city-dwellers are in crowded slums . In Alexandra, a slum in Johannesburg, there are more than 9,000 households per square km, compared with fewer than 700 in neighbouring Sandton, a posh suburb. In Kampala 71% of households sleep in a single room.
Other industries have been hammered too. Tourism, which employs more than 1m people in each of Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Africa, has collapsed. In Kenya and Ethiopia, both exporters of flowers, bulbs are being fed to cows and roses are rotting in heaps. Manufacturing is stricken. Orders have dried up for clothes exporters in Ethiopia, Ghana and Lesotho.
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