Africa, Italian doctor: the Covid massacre is there but cannot be seen

By Cristiano Antonino On Feb 15, 2022

The Italian doctor: “In Africa the Covid massacre is there, but it’s not visible, and claiming the opposite could cause further damage in terms of reduced interest and commitment to intervene with appropriate aid”

This is what Alessandro Campione, director of programmes at the non-profit organisation Jembi, which specialises in the development of eHealth and health information systems in the countries of the Southern African Development Community (Sadc), denounced.

Interviewed by Africa and Business, the Italian doctor stressed that in order to understand the impact that Covid has had in Africa, it is necessary to start from this premise:

“Most African countries do not have a good system to record morbidity and mortality so, to understand the real health situation of a country, the safest system is to look at the monitoring of deaths.”

The Italian doctor with over 30 years of experience in Africa and South America recalls that South Africa is among the leading industrialised economies on the African continent, with a mortality surveillance system on a weekly basis that is unique in the region.

“While the officially registered deaths in South Africa in January are over 90,000, figures released by the South African Institute of Health (Mrc) show almost 300,000 unexpected deaths, two-thirds more.

So the carnage is there, but you don’t see it,” he explained, pointing out that “the unexpected deaths are not necessarily due to Covid disease, but also to the consequences of Covid, because they may have been caused by lockdown, by stress in the health system, however related to Covid”.

“The result is that South Africa has paid a very high price.

And this situation can probably be applied to most African countries,” he pointed out.

The lower mortality caused by the Omicron variant, identified in South Africa last November, is also explained, ‘in addition to its likely lower severity, by the fact that immunity was already very high’ among the population.

Studies carried out in South Africa before Omicron emerged had in fact shown that ‘in the over-50s population there are up to 80% antibodies to Covid’.

And certainly not thanks to vaccines, since less than 30% of South Africans were vaccinated with two doses, but because ‘this country had already been hit hard’.

The Italian doctor: ‘It is not enough to send vaccines’

With regard to vaccines, Campione stressed that “it is not enough to send vaccines, perhaps with a short expiry date, and not make sure there are cold rooms to keep them, syringes, safety devices for health personnel, just as it is not enough to send the doses and then not give lots and lots of funds to carry out the campaigns”.

As a doctor who has been involved in vaccination campaigns in Africa for years, ‘I know that huge investments are needed to mobilise the ministry, civil society organisations and the media to reach the villages and raise awareness’.

And this commitment on the part of the international community seems insufficient at present.

Two years after the start of the pandemic, Campione said, “it is time to go beyond emergency interventions and start thinking about future prevention”, guaranteeing more targeted aid to the African continent.

First of all, he said, by allocating ‘resources to create information systems and mortality data registers, surveillance systems and mutation research systems, to help African countries monitor the situation and find variants’, and certainly, he concluded, ‘not to close them down as soon as they find one, as happened with Omicron, but because variants must be monitored so that action can be taken immediately’.

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