Infectious disease specialist Jorge Atouguia believes that a life spent more abroad and the youth of the population helped Africa in the fight against Covid-19, which hit the continent five years ago, with its full impact still unknown today.
Five years ago, just a few weeks before the then unknown coronavirus hit the continent, Jorge Atougia told Lusa that Africa has been spared from diseases like coronavirus, as it has fewer air connections, fewer confined spaces and more heat, but he warned that it also has fewer means to respond to a possible outbreak.
"Let's keep our fingers crossed that there are no cases [of coronavirus] in Africa," he declared at the time. Covid-19, a disease caused by a virus that has been named in the meantime (SARS-CoV-2), has reached Africa and the rest of the world and its impact on the African continent has apparently not grown as quickly as health professionals and researchers feared.
Today, the tropical medicine specialist believes that the fact that people in Africa lived more abroad, with less proximity than in large cities on other continents, together with the younger age of the population, with greater immune capacity to respond to diseases, contributed to the pandemic not having more devastating effects in the region.
However, he believes that limitations in testing, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, led to poor counting of cases.
"Countries did not have the capacity to make the diagnosis, [the infections] were not detected and therefore were not counted," he said.
For Jorge Atouguia, the real impact of the pandemic on the African continent is still unknown today.
"Africa started testing a long time after the countries in the northern hemisphere" and only started making vaccines "also much later, months, half a year later, in many cases even more", he said, asking: "If there are no records, we cannot have any kind of proof that this happened, right?"
Regarding mortality, Jorge Atouguia also identifies difficulties in a real reading of the impact of covid-19.
And remember that, even after the blocking of people entering countries, mortality from diseases, such as respiratory or infectious infections, which fell in the northern hemisphere, due to measures such as the use of masks, did not decrease in Africa, which may indicate that these mortality levels included those caused by Covid-19, without being identified as such.
For the professor at the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, now retired, the pandemic reinforced the inequality in access to disease prevention and treatment that the African continent suffers from, as was seen decades ago in access to medication against HIV, which continues.
"It was only many years after we began to introduce antiretroviral therapies that Africans began to have access to these therapies and at this time there continues to be a huge gap between what we use in northern countries and what Africans use," he said.
According to Jorge Atouguia, "most African countries do not have access to the latest drugs" against HIV.
"I don't know to what extent this is in people's minds, that Africa is always the martyr continent from the point of view of access to health," he concluded.
According to figures from the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), an agency of the African Union (AU), Covid-19 has infected 12.1 million people in 54 African nations, representing 2% of cases worldwide. At least 256,000 people died.
