The co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), Bill Gates has stated that the world still does not have enough data to understand why COVID-19 numbers have not been as high as predicted in Africa.
The American philanthropist and billionaire who invests heavily on healthcare in Africa said he is, however, happy to have been wrong about COVID-19 rates in Africa.
“One thing I’m happy to have been wrong about—at least, I hope I was wrong—is my fear that COVID-19 would run rampant in low-income countries,” he wrote in his end of the year note.
“So far, this hasn’t been true. In most of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, case rates and death rates remain much lower than in the U.S. or Europe and on par with New Zealand, which has received so much attention for its handling of the virus.
“The hardest-hit country on the continent is South Africa—but even there, the case rate is 40 percent lower than in the U.S., and the death rate is nearly 50 percent lower.”
According to Gates, “more than 1.6 million people have died in the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 75 million cases and tens of trillions of dollars in economic damages”.
The US has been the hardest-hit country in the world — while South Africa, the continent’s most industrialised nation, has been the most affected in Africa.
Bill Gates had warned early 2020 that Africa could be the worse hit by COVID-19, stating at a conference that the virus would overwhelm health systems in the world’s poorest continent.
Melinda Gates, also a co-chair at BMGF, said the developing world will be hard-hit, she added that she foresees bodies lying around in the street of African countries.
But this has not been the case –and the world does not understand why.1d