Africa braces for worst as pandemic nears ‘full speed’
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — The COVID-19 pandemic is reaching “full speed” in Africa, the chief of the continent’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week, with an official in South Africa reporting that a single province in that country is preparing 1.5 million graves.
Just a day after confirmed coronavirus cases across Africa reached the half-million mark, the total climbed past 522,000, with more than 12,000 deaths. With testing levels low, the real numbers are unknown.
South Africa has the most confirmed cases on the continent, with more than 250,000. For the first time, Gauteng province — home to Johannesburg and the administrative capital, Pretoria — has the country’s most cases, with more than 75,000, or nearly a third of the national total.
Provincial official Bandile Masuku, a doctor, startled South Africans when he told reporters Wednesday that Gauteng is preparing more than 1.5 million graves.
“It’s a reality that we need to deal with,” he said, and it is the public’s responsibility “to make sure that we don’t get there.”
But the province sought to calm fears Thursday, saying in a statement that it “does not have over a million already open dug graves,” and that Masuku meant only that the province has enough space for that many. It also said six members of the province’s COVID-19 “war room” have tested positive for the virus.
Several models forecast between 40,000 and 80,000 deaths in South Africa by the end of the year.
Asked about the graves, Africa CDC chief John Nkengasong said Thursday that “there’s absolutely no harm to think ahead” and prepare for the “worst-case scenario.”
“We’ve crossed a critical number here,” he said of the half-million milestone. “Our pandemic is getting full speed.”
He called for people to wear masks and for more testing. Just 5.7 million coronavirus tests have been conducted across the continent of 1.3 billion people.
With painful memories of people in Africa dying of AIDS years ago while waiting for accessible drugs, the Africa CDC on Thursday launched a consortium aimed at conducting more than 10 late-stage COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials on the continent as quickly as possible.
“We want to be sure we don’t find ourselves in the 1996 scenario, where HIV drugs were available, but it took almost seven years for those drugs to be accessible on the continent,” Nkengasong said.
With any COVID-19 vaccine, a “delay in Africa of even one year would be catastrophic,” he said.
He said the consortium of African institutions would engage with the global Gavi vaccine alliance and other entities outside the continent to ensure that a vaccine is distributed equitably from the start.
Those efforts are challenged by the U.S. and other countries making deals with vaccine makers to secure supplies in advance.
The African Union last month said governments around the world should “remove all obstacles” to swift and equitable distribution of any successful vaccine, making all intellectual property and technologies immediately available.
Africa has begun taking part in COVID-19 vaccine trials. Trials have begun in South Africa and Egypt, but Nkengasong said a “continent of 1.3 billion people deserves more than just two countries participating.”
A vaccine “is the only weapon to allow our lives to return to normal,” he said.
Many lifesaving vaccines have lagged between five and 20 years from the time they become available in high-income countries to when they’re available in low-income ones. That’s in part because local data is lacking, said Shabir Madhi, principal investigator of the Oxford COVID-19 vaccine trial in South Africa.