Africa has exactly 3,047,625 confirmed cases of Covid-19, including more than 72,300 deaths.
The threshold of three million infections with the new coronavirus was crossed on Monday in Africa, which remains the least affected continent in the world to date.
Africa has exactly 3,047,625 confirmed cases of Covid-19, including more than 72,300 deaths, according to the latest count established Monday by the World Health Organization(WHO). For now, the most affected countries on the continent, in terms of the number of positive cases, are South Africa, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Ethiopia and Algeria.
South Africa, with more than 1.2 million reported cases, including 32,824 deaths, accounts for more than 30% of the total of 54 countries on a continent, which has a population of 1.3 billion people. The weekly average of new cases has increased over the past two weeks in the country.
According to WHO data, it rose from more than 11,000 new cases in the week of December 28 to more than 30,000 new cases in the week of January 4. Last week, South Africa recorded more than 100,000 new people, including more than 3,600 deaths. The surge in cases comes as the country faces a resurgence of the disease, caused by a more contagious variant of the virus that is spreading rapidly.
North Africa, one of the most affected regions of the continent
In recent months, two different variants of "SARS-CoV-2" have been reported to WHO as unusual public health events in the UK, under the name "VOCs 202012/01", and in South Africa, under the name "501Y.V2".
But according to the UN World Health Agency, there is, at this stage, no clear evidence that the new South African variant is associated with a more serious disease or more adverse outcomes.
"More research is needed to understand the impact on transmission, the clinical severity of infection, laboratory diagnoses, therapies, vaccines or preventive public health measures," the WHO argued in its latest epidemiological bulletin.
Overall, North Africa remains the most affected part of the continent. Among the countries most affected by the disease are Morocco (452,532 cases and 7,743 deaths), Egypt (149,792 cases and 8,197 deaths), Tunisia (159,276 cases and 5,215 deaths), Libya (104,745 cases and 1,581 deaths) and Algeria (101,913 cases and 2,803 deaths).
In sub-Saharan Africa, Ethiopia has also surpassed the threshold of 100,000 cases. Addis Ababa has exactly 127,792 infections, including 1985 deaths. For its part, Nigeria has more than 97,000 cases of infection, including 1,342 deaths.
Faced with the recent appearance on the continent of new variants of Covid-19 that seem to have a stronger transmissibility, the WHO had called, at the end of last year, African countries to strengthen surveillance and genomic analysis in order to detect any new mutations and strengthen efforts to stop the pandemic.
