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WHO: Twothirds of people in Africa may have had COVID

More than two-thirds of people living in Africa may have contracted COVID-19 over the past two years, about 97 times more than the number of reported infections, a World Health Organization (WHO) report has suggested.

Laboratory tests have detected 11.5 million COVID-19 cases and 252,000 fatalities across the African continent. But according to the report released on Thursday, some 800 million people could have already been infected by last September.

Officials at the WHO’s Africa region said the study – which is still being peer-reviewed – suggests the officially confirmed numbers were “likely only scratching the surface of the real extent of coronavirus infections in Africa”.

“A new meta-analysis of standardised seroprevalence study revealed that the true number of infections could be as much as 97 times higher than the number of confirmed reported cases,” said WHO Africa boss Dr Matshidiso Moeti.

The report analysed more than 150 studies published between January 2020 and December last year. It showed exposure to the virus jumped from just three percent in June 2020 to 65 percent by September last year.

“In real terms, this means that in September 2021, rather than the reported 8.2 million cases, there were 800 million,” said Dr Moeti. The global average of true infection numbers is believed to be 16 times higher than the number of confirmed reported cases. With limited access to testing facilities for much of Africa’s population, many infections went undetected, as testing was mainly carried out on symptomatic patients in hospitals and travellers requiring negative PCR results. “The focus was very much on testing people who were symptomatic when there were challenges in having access to testing supplies” and this resulted in “under-representing the true number of people who have been exposed and are infected by the virus”, Dr Moeti said.

The WHO had last year already cautioned that six of every seven COVID infections went undetected in Africa.