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Unverified Legion of Trill member
As the rest of the world prepares for a vaccine-driven return to normal over the next few months, at her community health center in a poor, working class neighborhood of Cape Town, Andrea Mendelsohn is dreading the arrival of April and May—that’s when the weather will get cooler in the southern hemisphere and bring a surge in coronavirus cases.
Few people in South Africa—aside from medical staff like Mendelsohn—will be vaccinated by then. Elsewhere on the continent even health workers won’t be inoculated, making Africa a large reservoir of the virus that has infected almost 117 million people across the globe and killed more than 2.5 million.
“The arrival of vaccines is going to have zero impact on the third wave but at least I can be confident that when I go to work I won’t die,” Mendelsohn, a senior medical officer in the Western Cape Province’s Department of Health, said in an interview. “I am sure health workers in Malawi and Tanzania want to have the same relief.”
Most countries in Africa have yet to start inoculating their citizens. While developed countries have rushed to vaccinate their populations against Covid-19, fewer than half a million people have received shots in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region of 1.1 billion people. In contrast, the U.S., with a population of about 330 million, has administered over 90 million vaccine doses, while more than a third of the U.K.’s 67 million people have gotten at least one shot.
But anyone in the developed world who thinks they are unaffected by large swaths of un-vaccinated people in Africa, needs to think again, says Phionah Atuhebwe, the New Vaccines Introduction Medical Officer on the continent for the World Health Organization. As long as the pandemic continues to rage among un-vaccinated populations, spawning new, more virulent, vaccine-resistant strains, no one is safe, she said.
“The virus will definitely mutate and will keep mutating; the longer we keep the virus around the more mutations we’ll see,” Atuhebwe said in an interview from Brazzaville, in the Republic of Congo. “If Africa is not vaccinated and we are a source of mutations, we put the whole world at risk.”
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finance.yahoo.com
Few people in South Africa—aside from medical staff like Mendelsohn—will be vaccinated by then. Elsewhere on the continent even health workers won’t be inoculated, making Africa a large reservoir of the virus that has infected almost 117 million people across the globe and killed more than 2.5 million.
“The arrival of vaccines is going to have zero impact on the third wave but at least I can be confident that when I go to work I won’t die,” Mendelsohn, a senior medical officer in the Western Cape Province’s Department of Health, said in an interview. “I am sure health workers in Malawi and Tanzania want to have the same relief.”
Most countries in Africa have yet to start inoculating their citizens. While developed countries have rushed to vaccinate their populations against Covid-19, fewer than half a million people have received shots in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region of 1.1 billion people. In contrast, the U.S., with a population of about 330 million, has administered over 90 million vaccine doses, while more than a third of the U.K.’s 67 million people have gotten at least one shot.
But anyone in the developed world who thinks they are unaffected by large swaths of un-vaccinated people in Africa, needs to think again, says Phionah Atuhebwe, the New Vaccines Introduction Medical Officer on the continent for the World Health Organization. As long as the pandemic continues to rage among un-vaccinated populations, spawning new, more virulent, vaccine-resistant strains, no one is safe, she said.
“The virus will definitely mutate and will keep mutating; the longer we keep the virus around the more mutations we’ll see,” Atuhebwe said in an interview from Brazzaville, in the Republic of Congo. “If Africa is not vaccinated and we are a source of mutations, we put the whole world at risk.”
the rest at:
How Africa Can Save the World From a Never-Ending Pandemic
(Bloomberg) -- As the rest of the world prepares for a vaccine-driven return to normal over the next few months, at her community health center in a poor, working class neighborhood of Cape Town, Andrea Mendelsohn is dreading the arrival of April and May—that’s when the weather will get cooler...
