I get that, and am not saying that DSeid’s quote is wrong. But it seems like as we go on, they are finding things that contradict those earlier findings, so there might be things that were missed, even if it was an ‘extensive case tracking’ study. I doubt that South Korean (or Chinese who found similar things) physiology is that different from European (though my take is ‘humans are humans’ after all, as, again, I’m not expert, so maybe there is some fundamental difference that I’m clueless about), yet there seems to be some large differences in things as we move forward. South Korea is one of the really hard hit countries that also seems to have done a remarkable job of dealing with the virus very early on, though they maybe starting to see their second wave.
At any rate, that’s the best I gots. I can only relate what I’ve been told and what I’ve read, I don’t really know this stuff that well…it’s not even tangentially related to my own areas of expertise. Sadly, I’ve had to try and learn a lot of this stuff on the fly recently.
Well, if you find something that actually contradicts Dseid’s cite, from the head of the World Health Organization’s emerging diseases and zoonoses unit, I’d like to see it. Because what you quoted wasn’t a finding of anything, it was a pediatrician’s opinion.
There are some real reasons to worry even if the disease has not spread as far to date.
Africa has the majority of worldwide cases of HIV. That is a lot of people at higher risk of death.
Lagos, Nigeria is the largest city on the continent. A look at their situation as they transitioned into a 14 day lockdown highlights some red flags. When you have a decent chunk of your population living in poverty, with zero social safety net, and in many cases not having access to drinking/washing water in their home, mitigation measures can be difficult.
Libya is in the midst of a civil war and shares a border with Egypt. Fighting was expected to ramp back up again this year. The leaders of the warring parties probably face higher personal risks of death if they lose that fight than from the pandemic. Dying from pneumonia sucks. Being beaten, sodomized with a bayonet and then shot multiple times like Gadaffi also sucks. Controlling the pandemic may not be priority number one. It may not even be on the priority list. Maybe the various nations that were supporting the warring parties are so distracted the risk of fighting drops enough to let priorities shift to the virus…maybe.
Libya is at the northern tip of the land route taken by refugees, especially those fleeing fighting in the Sahel, on their way to Europe during what has been a large refugee crisis. The refugee numbers might drop but I would be surprised if they stop. The risks of dying on the trip or being sold in Libyan slave markets didn’t stop the flow. That produces what has been mostly a one way flow that can reasonably be expected to simply ignore things like legal declarations against travel. To the extent that nations on the route get better at enforcement and turning people back it can turn the flow into mixing function to spread the disease. Refugees from multiple nations mix as they travel with limited opportunity for hygiene and lots of physical stress weakening their immune systems. Then they deal with security forces that they might infect. If turned around they can carry the virus back along the route as far as they make it.
That refuge route to Libya is also a smuggling route. It, along with routes towards the middle east, is an important part of the logistics for the insurgent groups in the Sahel. Those are two way routes traveled by people that already ignore and avoid government attempts to stop their travel. There is a whole lot of transmission across international borders that is possible because of the instability in the Sahel.
If the deaths themselves are being reported in the first place, let alone classified as pneumonia.
Many of the countries in Africa have relatively weak governance. Despite recent high urbanization rates in Africa in the last few decades, the majority of people on the continent still lives in rural areas. Many are far from routine government intervention. Mix the two and reporting, especially of rural deaths, may not be very accurate.
Then there the failed states of Libya and Somalia. We should not expect the competing claimants to power to be very good about reporting anything. They have bigger problems and limited spans of control.
There are also a number of functioning states in Africa that have their reach limited by currently active insurgencies. Parts of those countries function under government control. In some parts the mere existence of the government officials responsible for the area can be in question. Just an example from the March report by the UN Secretary General on the mission in Mali
For some of the parts of Africa where the official government data is suspect the estimate is also likely suspect. The estimate you propose is probably fine if you just want to check to see if Egypt is trying to cover things up. For the countries of the Sahel region, Libya, and Somalia it risks being an exercise in GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out.)
There are differences in opinion about whether the pattern of SARS-CoV-2 spread is different in Africa compared with that in the United States and Europe. So far, despite a paucity of data, it appears that the virus is spreading differently and potentially with an attenuated outcome in Africa. There has been limited testing of asymptomatic cases or of antibody titers. Therefore, it is unknown whether early interventions were successful in preventing transmission or whether there are differences in susceptibility between populations of different regions. Perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic can emphasize the need for widespread implementation of public health tools, such as high-quality data, accurate diagnostics for track and trace, good communication, and an effective vaccine.
This seems really important, in terms of understanding this disease fully, so one wonders why there hasn’t been more study done along these lines. I may be wrong, but I’m under the impression that we are devoting tremendous resources to the study of this virus, so that we could send some teams to places in Africa to collect data if we wanted to. Again, I may be wrong, but to a naive outsider it seems, on the surface, easy enough to do?
Bump for another update. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/11/11/science.abe1916?rss=1
Consistent with the virus being as wide-spread in African population as in places like the United States after initial surge, but with identified cases, let alone symptomatic cases and identified deaths from covid-19, being relatively extremely low - to degrees that the authors feel is not explainable by poor reporting (or poor testing or misclassification) or even the population pyramid skew to younger age groups.