The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday said seven African countries will begin administering coronavirus antibody tests from next week as part of efforts to understand the extent of the outbreak on the continent, reported Reuters.
“Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Nigeria, Morocco are the first set of countries that committed to it,” said John Nkengasong, head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Addis Ababa, in a weekly news briefing held via video link.
The number of confirmed cases and deaths reported on the continent of 1.3 billion people has been relatively low due to poor data collection. The governments now want to use antibody tests to find out how many of their citizens have been infected.
Nkengasong said Africa has so far conducted 9.4 million coronavirus tests, a 10% increase over last week. The continent’s relative isolation has so far spared it the worst of the pandemic, but experts say low levels of testing in many countries mean Africa’s infection rates are likely to be higher than reported.
Nkengasong revealed that the COVID-19 recovery rate in Africa stood at 72%. He said 769,000 patients have fully recovered, translating to a 72% recovery rate. Over 24,000 people have died across all 55 African nations, with more than 1.07 million cases reported. Last week, an 8% increase was recorded in new cases, amounting to 79,200 new cases.
Nkengasong said the continent averaged 11,000 new cases on average per day. According to him, the rate of infections among health workers stood at 3.6%, as 42,000 health workers having been infected so far.
South Africa recorded 53% of all coronavirus cases recorded in the continent, followed by Egypt 8.9%, Nigeria 4.5%, Ghana 3.9%, and Algeria 3.4%. More than 9 million tests have been conducted so far on the continent. The fatality rate stands at 2.26%.
