Abstract
BackgroundBorn in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on global health and economies have been and continue to be devastating. In Africa, its countries grieve for unprecedented burdens of caseloads and mortality due to COVID-19, the virus responsible for the disease. This narrative review aims to establish the scale of the health and economic crisis wrought by the pandemic in Africa, including its impact on the informal economic sector, projections of the effect on national GDP, as well as its political dimensions.MethodsDocumentary evidence issued between January and 8 August 2020 was sought from the Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases. Searches of published and unpublished abstracts were also conducted from appropriate websites, government documents, organizational reports, newspaper commentaries, and reports issued by global, regional, and local centers of disease control and prevention.ResultsThe COVID-19 pandemic is responsible for a fourfold crisis in Africa: (1) a health crisis: the victimization of frontline healthcare workers and the looming caseload and death tolls with 1.039 million (12%) cases being confirmed and over 22,966 (2.4%) deaths as of 8 August 2020. The highest death toll was recorded in Southern Africa of 11,024 (48%) followed by North Africa with 6,989 (29.2%) deaths; (2) a social crisis: with the violation of human rights, the killing of citizens by security forces and increased crime. This, in turn, exacerbates social inequalities, the breakdown of households, instances of social unrest, and general impoverishment; (3) an economic crisis: manifested by a decline in GDP and mass unemployment; (4) a political crisis: implementation of measures that may not be appropriate for Africa, discrimination of refugees and immigrants, evacuation of citizens to their home countries, resulting in distrust of political leaders and postponement of national elections, and mounting cases of conflicts and unrest.ConclusionLockdown during the COVID-19 outbreak is a prevention mechanism in affluent countries, in contrast to developing regions such as Africa, where it is a race against death and starvation. Policymakers must apply novel and locally relevant prevention and management strategies to cope with this growing disaster.
Highlights
Born in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on global health and economies have been and continue to be devastating
Selection criteria We two authors independently assessed all titles and abstracts of identified studies and applied the following four inclusion criteria to determine if the reports warranted further investigation: (1) did they include African counties? (2) were they published in English? (3) were the contents pertinent to the aim of the study? (4) were they published between January and July 2020? Full-text versions of journal articles or other source documents were obtained of studies that met the inclusion criteria; for those where this was unclear, we reached consensus after a discussion
We reviewed data from The Coronavirus Resource Centre at Johns Hopkins University, displayed in Table 2, which shows that African countries have case fatality rates ranging from 0.5% in Ghana to 8.1% in Chad, compared to 15.0% for the United Kingdom (UK), 14.1% for Italy, and 3.3% in Brazil
Summary
Born in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on global health and economies have been and continue to be devastating. In Africa, its countries grieve for unprecedented burdens of caseloads and mortality due to COVID-19, the virus responsible for the disease This narrative review aims to establish the scale of the health and economic crisis wrought by the pandemic in Africa, including its impact on the informal economic sector, projections of the effect on national GDP, as well as its political dimensions. The rapid and global spread of the coronavirus disease due to COVID-19 poses the greatest public health and economic crisis the world has faced in over a century. It affects all races, genders, and religious groups, regardless of their economic status [1, 2]. Realizing the growing number of cases in developed countries, and the inability of their health systems to deal with the overwhelming number of sick people who needed critical care, African countries such as Kenya, South Africa, Rwanda, and Uganda started to take preventive measures in early February 2020 that included lockdowns, flight bans, shutting down educational institutions such as schools and universities, closing international borders, banning public transport, and imposing curfews [10, 11]
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