Although Africa reported its millionth official COVID-19 case last week, it seems to have weathered the pandemic relatively well so far, with fewer than one confirmed case for every thousand people and just 23,000 deaths so far. Yet several antibody surveys suggest far more Africans have been infected with the coronavirus—a discrepancy that is puzzling scientists around the continent. “We do not have an answer,” says immunologist Sophie Uyoga at the Kenya Medical Research Institute–Wellcome Trust Research Programme.
The opening paragraph from Science Magazine's August 11th article The pandemic appears to have spared Africa so far. Scientists are struggling to explain why One word you will not find in the article is Hydroxychloroquine or Chloroquine when it comes to explaining what is going on in Africa, those words are taboo.
Africa has, by far, the worlds largest problem with malaria, they have been treating the disease for decades. In researching for this post I came across this article from VOA which was published back in May, the title basically sums up the article, Djibouti is Treating All COVID Patients with Chloroquine, But Scientists Urge Caution. The article begins like this highlights by me:
Djibouti has more than 1,800 COVID-19 cases, making it the African country with the highest number of cases per 100,000 people. But more than 1,000 of those cases have already recovered and only nine people have died from the disease. The head of Djibouti’s main COVID-19 response center says systematically giving COVID-19 patients the anti-malarial drug chloroquine is the main reason for the country's low death rate. But even scientists who see evidence of the efficacy of chloroquine caution on their use.
Since the article is over two months old I decided to see how Djibouti is doing, so I went to WorldMeter to see how they are fairing. You will be glad to hear that they had no new cases or deaths today. They have had a total of 5,374 cases with 59 Covid-19 deaths. Djibouti is a very small country though, less than a million citizens, so I decided to check out one of Africa's more populous nations, Kenya.
Kenya is one and a half times more populous than California with almost sixty million inhabitants. They, like most African nations, suffer from malaria where more than four million cases are reported annually. California is not known for malaria but has had 11,800 Covid-19 fatalities whereas the far more populated Kenya has had 516. It is not like the virus is new to Kenya, the first recorded case was back on March 15, which is about half way between New York's first recorded case, March 1 and its first Covid-19 death on March 30th on its way to over 32,000 deaths. Did I mention Kenya has had 516 deaths since their first case? California's hardest hit location is Las Angeles, an obviously very populated urban center of almost four million people, but Nairobi, Kenya has a population of four and a half million and twice the population density.
The nations of Africa have been taking chloroquine for decades in their fight against malaria. It is as almost as commonly used there as aspirin. Yet for some reason, we know the reason, money, nobody wants to link the amazing resilience Africa is having against the virus compared to other areas of the world. It is not that they are not susceptible to the virus, there own testing shows that they have it and have had it. From the Science article:
Scientists who surveyed about 10,000 people in the northeastern cities of Nampula and Pemba in Mozambique found antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in 3% to 10% of participants, depending on their occupation; market vendors had the highest rates, followed by health workers. Yet in Nampula, a city of approximately 750,000, a mere 300 infections had been confirmed at the time. Mozambique only has 16 confirmed COVID-19 deaths. Yap Boum, a microbiologist and epidemiologist with Epicentre Africa, the research and training arm of Doctors Without Borders, says he found a high prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in people from Cameroon as well, a result that remains unpublished.
So what explains the huge gap between antibody data on the one hand and the official case and death counts on the other? Part of the reason may be that Africa misses many more cases than other parts of the world because it has far less testing capacity.
You can miss cases for lack of testing, but deaths are pretty obvious. No, there is something else going on in Africa, and it has nothing to do with testing. It is willfully ignoring a possible even probable explanation in order that the "Public Health" community can exploit there golden goose, a full fledged panic induced viral pandemic. A pandemic that very likely has a treatment with one of the longest and largest trials in scientific history to prove it, if they would just quit hiding from it.
As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serangetti
I seek to cure what's deep inside, frightened of this thing that
I've become
It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
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