[imagesource: World Health Organization/Daniel Elombat]

Despite the fact that we are nearing six months of lockdown here in South Africa, with other parts of the world having shuttered their borders even earlier than that, there is still so much about the COVID-19 virus that remains unknown.

It is a mysterious enemy, and one that has also mutated in some minor ways as it replicates, and a great deal of guesswork has gone into trying to figure out the hows and whys of what has happened in certain parts of the world.

Early predictions painted a dire prediction for many African countries, but those haven’t always been accurate.

Here’s the Guardian:

Prof Francesco Checchi, a specialist in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told MPs it was “broadly” true that coronavirus had not behaved in expected ways in African countries, including Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan and Somalia.

“We are certainly observing a pattern that confounds us a little,” he told the international development committee’s inquiry into the impact of Covid on humanitarian crises.

“In a few important case studies – Kenya, for example – what seems to be happening is the epidemic may be peaking earlier than our naive models predicted.”

Checchi also pointed to Yemen, in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, as another country that had gone from an overwhelmed healthcare system in May to a situation where the pandemic has largely “passed”.

He said the Yemeni population may have accrued some sort of “herd immunity”, at least temporarily:

[Checchi] and colleagues are now looking at explanations for the earlier than predicted peak in some low-income countries.

“These range from the effect of age, to some sort of role for pre-existing immunity to pre-exposure to other infections, to other hypotheses. It isn’t a simple analysis.”

There’s good news to take from these countries, obviously, but there is also a note of caution:

Checchi said he was unable to say whether it had been less lethal or less severe on a per capita basis. In many developing countries, where testing is poor and deaths are not notified to the authorities, the rate of reported deaths is very low.

For example, in Damascus, Syria, a new study suggests that just over 1% of COVID-19 deaths have been reported.

Our excess death numbers also point to our true COVID-19 death toll being significantly higher than the official count, although the discrepancy is nowhere near the same as Damascus.

Whilst we celebrate the impending drop to alert level 1, and the return of certain freedoms, a special envoy to the World Health Organisation warned earlier in the week that the world was still at the “beginning” of the pandemic.

Let’s keep our guards up.

[source:guardian]