Abstract
COVID-19 pandemic: The African paradox.
Highlights
Africa-if-not-controlled; last accessed July 21, 2020). Whether this paradox is due to genetics and immunity, comparatively young population, lower rates of comorbidities or just due to limited testing and late arriver of the pathogen in the continent, the low COVID-19 morbidity in African countries, with its fragile health care system, continues to puzzle experts
Since SARS-CoV-2 was introduced at different time points in different countries, an approach to capture the COVID-19 trajectory would be tracking the number of infected cases from the day of the first reported case in countries of multiple continents
Comorbidities, genetics, parasite exposure, younger population age might contribute to low COVID-19 severity/ fatality in Africa
Summary
A recent study used a weather model to predict regions associated with a higher risk of COVID-19 community spread [2]. The high-risk temperate Western country zones and South Africa which have 5-11°C mean temperatures and 47%-79% relative humidity have more COVID-19 cases than tropical African countries (Figure 1, Panel A). Tropical Asian and Latin American countries are disproportionately infected by SARS-CoV-2 compared to tropical African countries (Figure 1, Panel A) suggesting oth-. COVID-19 pandemic has shown a markedly low proportion of cases among young people, and this could be the reason why COVID-19 death rate is the lowest in African countries except South Africa. COVID-19 infections are rising sharply in South Africa which resembles the countries of South America more than those of its home continent (Figure 1, Panel A)
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