Africa passes 2M virus cases

Continent’s health officials worry about vaccine availability

NAIROBI, Kenya — Africa has surpassed 2 million confirmed coronavirus cases as the continent’s top public health official warned Thursday that “we are inevitably edging toward a second wave” of infections.

The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the 54-nation continent has seen more than 48,000 deaths from COVID-19.

The African continent of 1.3 billion people is being warned against “prevention fatigue” as countries loosen pandemic restrictions to ease their economies’ suffering and more people travel.

“We cannot relent. If we relent, then all the sacrifices we put into efforts over the past 10 months will be wiped away,” Africa CDC director John Nkengasong told reporters. He expressed concern that “many countries are not enforcing public health measures, including masking, which is extremely important.”

While the world takes hope from promising COVID-19 vaccines, African health officials also worry the continent will suffer as richer countries buy up supplies.

“Let’s celebrate the good news” first, Nkengasong said. But he warned that the Pfizer vaccine requires storage at minus -94 degrees, and such a requirement “already creates an imbalance in the fair distribution or access to those vaccines” as richer countries will be better equipped to move quickly.

A storage network at -94 was put in place for West Africa’s Ebola outbreak a few years ago, but that was localized, Nkengasong said.

The Moderna vaccine requires storage at -4 degrees, which Nkengasong called promising. But the price of any COVID-19 vaccine is another factor in their fair distribution, he said. “So if a vaccine is $40, it becomes almost exclusive to parts of the world” that can afford it.

But he offered an optimistic early look at attitudes across Africa toward any COVID-19 vaccine. Early data from a vaccine perception survey in 11 countries showed 81 percent of respondents would accept a vaccine, he said. “So that’s very, very encouraging news.”

In other developments:

■ University of Oxford scientists expect to report results from the latestage trials of their COVID-19 vaccine by Christmas, a researcher said Thursday as he discussed the team’s latest findings.

■ As winter nears and coronavirus cases surge across the Middle East, the regional director for the World Health Organization said Thursday that the only way to avoid mass deaths is for countries to tighten restrictions and enforce preventative measures quickly. In a news briefing from Cairo, Ahmed al-mandhari, director of WHO’S eastern Mediterranean region, which comprises most of the Middle East, expressed concern that countries in the area were lowering their guard after lockdowns imposed earlier this year.

■ The 82-year-old head of the Orthodox Church of Greece, Archbishop Ieronymos, has been hospitalized after being diagnosed with COVID-19, the Archdiocese of Athens announced Thursday.