By Babajide Okeowo
With a whopping 2.5 % death rate, Africa has overtaken the rest of the world in the cases of fatalities associated with the COVID 19 pandemic.
The continent’s fatality rate currently stands at 2.5%, which is higher than the global rate of 2.2%, a clear departure from earlier in the pandemic, when the death rate in Africa was much lower than that of the global level.
This development is attributed to the fact that the continent continues to battle with a shortage of oxygen and other resources during this second wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
This disclosure was made by the Director of Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), John Nkengasong, on Thursday, January 21, 2021, during a press conference.
While describing the trend as alarming experts, the continent’s CDC boss pointed out that earlier in the pandemic, Africa’s death rate had been below the global average.
“The case fatality rate is beginning to be very worrying and concerning for all of us’’ he said.
Nkengasong also said that 21 African countries are now recording the Covid-19 death rate of above 3% as the number of countries in the continent with a higher fatality rate than the global average continues to grow.
Some of the countries include Egypt, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Mali, Sudan and a host of others.
Recall that Africa has so far recorded 3.3 million cases of coronavirus infections with 82,000 fatalities as of Thursday.
These figures represent a small fraction of the global total, but cases have been reported to have increased by 14% each week in the last 1 month.
According to data from Africa CDC, over the past week, cases decreased by nearly 7% compared to the previous week while deaths increased by 10%.
The continent reported 207,000 new cases in the past week, with South Africa alone reporting 100,000 of those new cases.
