However, as a rare attempt to probe the African death toll with clinical data, the BU team’s work has had a significant impact, outside experts say. Before its first paper, Watson, who has done some research related to covid-19 in low-income settings, said there was a “fairly equal balance” in academia between those who believe there is “something fundamentally different going on in Africa that means not many deaths are happening” and who emphasize the lack of data.
The Zambian study, he said, played an important role in “turning the narrative” on to the second idea. Uganda’s Kirenga says the study resonates with his observations about potentially being missing there. However, Roma Chilengi, special adviser to Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema, who also heads Zambia’s official surveillance data aggregator, said he still believes the pandemic is not deadly in the country. As expected: the initial concerns were that “sweeping like wildfire,” he told me, did not happen. However, Chilengi broadly agreed with the BU team’s conclusions. We certainly have had a lot of people die from covid but go undiagnosed.
Survivors — and algorithms — agree
In addition to UTH cadavers, an increasing number of non-technical studies have also contributed to the assertion that the majority of deaths in Africa have been missed. A piece of paper published in The Lancet Last May, a follow-up of nearly 6,800 confirmed or suspected covid-19 patients referred to critical care facilities in 10 African countries, showed less than half were admitted. and 48% of people died within a month. According to the authors of the paper, this represents an in-hospital mortality rate in excess of 11 to 23 deaths per 100 patients compared with the global average – a number they consider inadequate. personnel and the frequent absence of life-saving interventions such as oxygenation and dialysis.
JASON MULIKITA
Although Zambia was not included in the study, locals tell me that treatment gaps are also very serious. Sky Banda, a 58-year-old resident of Kaunda Square, a complex named after Zambia’s first president, said many community members who fell ill during the height of the pandemic considered hospitalizations. like a “ticket to the morgue”. Most opt for at-home herbal treatments instead.
Onechi Lwenje, a 36-year-old filmmaker who spent a week in zone 19 in UTH during Zambia’s second batch in early 2021, says staff is so overwhelmed that some patients will die and go undetected. present for many hours. “Most of the people who enter that area never come out,” he said.
Although mortality records in Africa are still patchy, efforts to estimate excess mortality through statistical solutions also support the theory of underrepresentation. A machine learning model developed by The Economist, based on more than 100 indicators that correlates with excess deaths in the countries for which such data are available, shows that Africa has seen 1.1 million to 3 million deaths since the pandemic began. A model from the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, included in a paper published by The Lancet in March, giving the figure, as of December 2021, at 2.1 million for sub-Saharan Africa alone, with a central estimate for Zambia of 81,000—20 times the official figure of 3,967.
