It may still be far behind other regions of the world but Africa’s coronavirus infections have now transcended 1 million, heightening concerns by the African Union about the inadequacy of tests to detect the virus in member countries.
While Europe has 1.7 million cases, the US has 4.8 million infected individuals.
The African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention says the current cases of infection stands at 1,077,366, 22, 066 deaths and 690,436 recoveries.
The body under the African Union says it suspects the numbers could be even higher than this official figure with South Africa alone accounting for well over 500, 000 infections and still counting.
Egypt and Nigeria are the other countries with the worst number of cases and deaths from Covid-19.
The other countries to watch over the next few weeks are Ghana, Morocco, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
South Africa with even by far the best health infrastructure in the whole of Africa have seen its testing capacities questioned since the disease became widespread.
From the onset of the pandemic in Africa, experts had always suspected that, the exact figures of infection from the virus may never be known thanks to challenges in carrying out tests consistently, arranging data and defeating the disbelief and conspiracy theories about the disease.
For example a country like Tanzania left the medical world bewildered when it said the virus was on its way to being banished from its shores completely.
The East African country has failed to provide reliable data about its number of cases in the months preceding July this year.
Some eight million people may have been tested continent-wide but officials at the African Union feel this should be more if a truly global picture could be gleaned from the pandemic’s onslaught in Africa.
In Egypt and Nigeria, the countries with the second and third highest number of cases of the virus in Africa respectively, tests for the disease are still low.
Barring South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt, fewer than than 5,000 cases have been reported from other African countries, according to the continent’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC is concerned about the lack of adequate testing on the continent as one of the main challenges in tracking and arresting the spread of the virus.
It insisted that tests should be increased in almost all African countries to keep track of the virus’s spread.
But fighting the misinformation and stereotypes about the disease may be long and hard too.
For example in The Gambia like most other African countries, many still find it hard to do away with the theory that the coronavirus and the pandemic around it is a hoax being sold to the people for reasons best known to its so-called orchestrators.
Thus even the most basics of health safety measures are not being seriously observed like social distancing, hand-washing and the wearing of face masks.
WN/as/APA