OPINION: Is Africa learning any lessons from this pandemic?

When and if Africa ever comes to terms with Covid-19, whether such reckoning means the disease has been defeated or weakened but remaining low key, it will still take many years to recover from the consequences of the continent’s war against this disease.

There will be many challenges that are only remotely related to the disease itself but needing to be figured out in Africa’s contexts. For example, one, among many tragic things, the fight against the virus has now created in Africa and will most likely leave behind, should it go away, will be what public health experts are now describing as unprecedented and most significant reduction in child vaccination in the last 20 years - that many children did not access vaccination services due to restriction related to Covid-19. Many countries in Africa, some of which had registered phenomenal levels of vaccination coverage, have now reported declines of up to 20 per cent due to sweeping precautionary guidelines in the fight against the pandemic.

Promoting social distancing

The caveat to this finding is that countries that have been successful in promoting social distancing, in getting their people to adhere to avoidance of crowding, maintain personal hygiene rituals and use face coverings, have been the only ones that have also kept up their vaccination campaigns, making the reduction in vaccination in their population very minimal. The lesson here is that social distancing and sweeping lockdowns that so many countries executed may have worked in some countries, albeit at the expense of certain civic rights, in most countries their success has been limited, leaving many Africans wondering whether these were the best approaches to begin with and what their world will be like in a after Covid-19, now that most countries the world over are working their ways gradually towards easing these restrictions that Africa had adopted and which have been so negatively consequential for ordinary citizens.

The obvious question then is whether the low case numbers in Africa have anything to do with the precautionary policies instituted by African governments, or whether there are other more scientifically curious factors. Is there a way to measure what the situation would have been like had governments not acted so fast to close down society, simply emulating other regions of the world?

The elephant in the room then is how Africa has fared in all of this. By all accounts, Africa has neither beaten nor has the continent turned out to be the worst-hit as was initially feared. No one can say for sure why Africa seems to have been spared the worse that every logical public health scenario had painted. How did Africa do it, if we can indeed not suggest that the low case numbers in Africa are due to African governments’ policies and actions? What did Africans do that made the continent so “blessed” in the face of a tragedy that engulfed the rest of the world, a world that is often thought of as most prepared for the types of situations that Covid-19 has created, a part of the world that is too wealthy to get sick, that couldn’t be overwhelmed by a microscopic organism?

There is no question that early action by states, particularly in restricting movement of people, shutting down the economies and telling their people that there is a new invisible but deadly animal in the neighborhood, remain the only obvious factors in Africa’s low case numbers. Other public health emergency measures enacted by countries like South Africa, Gabon, Senegal and Ghana, a combination of research, treatment, public awareness raising, avoidance of actions that could have overwhelmed hospitals, undoubtedly helped. These countries have now achieved that elusive milestone of “flattening the curve.” Others banked on their past experiences with past disease outbreaks. South Africa, for example, deployed an army of 28,000 contact tracers to track the spread of the coronavirus, and has flattened the curve of infections since May, perhaps owing this success partly to her experience in combating both HIV and TB.

Precautionary actions

While these precautionary actions by some countries do indeed explain the relative success in controlling the virus, it is not evident that most African countries were successful in enforcing these measures. In South Sudan, for example, a lockdown could not be achieved for a variety of reasons related to the structure of the economy, the nature of social relations or lack of awareness about the nature of the disease, and yet, the situation did not explode in that country as was predicted by the head of UN, the Special Representative of the Secretary General and by other powerful entities such as prominent NGOs. Even more curious is Africa’s low mortality as a percentage of all confirmed cases. What explains this? A plethora of unconvincing explanations have offered themselves, some containing scientific logic, such as Africa’s youthful population and the small percentage of elderly people being a possible factor; but others as pure naivety, such as the invincibility of the African person to this particular virus. Some have even proffered a spiritual angle to it, that perhaps Africa has had more than enough of her share with viruses and other causes of death, and the supernatural has taken a kind view on the continent this time around.

Surely, the global pandemic is far from over. In fact, Covid-19 is here to stay for a while and from a purely public health perspective, it is only reasonable to keep the precaution that it might still strike the continent. There is a series of questions that remain unanswered and should inspire continuous research both in terms of what gave Africa the advantage in the face of this deadly microbe and how to keep the experiences in this combat, should the world experience a situation akin to this disease again in the future. For example, the science laboratories all across Africa, especially in countries such as Kenya that have a long history of disease surveillance, virology and genetic research, are at work, but are not being sufficiently used in order to come up with a Pan African capacity to do such things without needing the Global North to come to the rescue. The biggest Pan African body, the African Union Centers for Disease Control (AU-CDC), is not actively involved in coordinating continent-wide programmes and is almost entirely invisible to the ordinary African. How much collaboration is there between different country teams within Africa and beyond? What will it take Africa to put this disease behind her through a vaccine that Africans would afford?

The only visible front

This leaves research as the only visible front where African armies of researchers can congregate, where continental funding can be made really meaningful. As things stand, the single country projects, all of which rely on financial support from America, Europe or China, don’t seem a match to the challenge of this type of disease outbreaks. Such a continental effort should become concerted and vigorous as African knowledge centres on virology, disease, genetics and public health center of excellence that can quickly be deployed in similar situations in the future, should another pandemic strike.

An important area of inquiry is to juxtapose the impact of the disease in terms of rendering the society unable to care for its members on account of the public health measures that shut down the economy and the whole society, and the now evident reality that the measures put in place by government cannot actually be cited as the main reasons for Covid-19 being less virulent in Africa.

Scientific curiosity

If Africa was a place that supports scientific curiosity, putting money into laboratories and seeking collaboration with the rest of the world, it would now be teeming with all manner of research project proposals, whether on vaccine development front, or on probing into possible health idiosyncrasies in Africa; whether African climate, genetics, history, social systems or gods have anything to do with it; if the way Africans’ lives matter in this and a variety of other inquisitive directions.

While it is likely that the rest of the world will eventually beat Africa to a vaccine, both in terms of its development and capacity to pay for it, where is the evidence that Africans are working to tailor vaccines to local realities in genetics, or in the absence of a promise of a locally developed vaccine, choose another path based on the unique experience with Covid-19?