More than a year after the start of the pandemic in Kenya, it is already possible to draw some effective conclusions about the incidence of the virus not only in the country, but in all of sub-Saharan Africa, with the possible exception of South Africa.
The fact is that very few people die of Covid-19 here.
Of course, the numbers are the official ones, but it is the data from hospitals and national mortuaries, funerals and mobilisations in the villages that show that there have been no great variations, if not decreases, in the number of deaths everywhere.
This can be ascribed to a combination of more or less established and refuted circumstances, including the resistance of Africans to influenza viruses (also by genetic means, and in this sense an important study will be published shortly), open spaces that limit transmission, the climate and the presence of the sun that increases the immune defences, stress and, last but not least, the average age of the population, since Covid-19, as is known, has mainly killed people aged 70 and over, as has always been the case with pneumonia.
In any case, the total deaths in Kenya in one year are those of the Abruzzo region alone, which, moreover, has one-thirtieth of the population.
If we add that there has never been a real lockdown and that the population has practically never respected the slightest rules of containment (masks are mostly used only in guarded places and to avoid police checks, social distances are never maintained, etc.), we can understand how the humanitarian catastrophe predicted by the World Health Organisation for the African continent has fortunately not come true and this third wave has only made things slightly worse.
The only concern is the state of health structures, and in particular the cost of private health care, which worries the wealthy and foreigners present in the area.
In public facilities (but this is more or less the case for every type of illness), defections and problems have been the order of the day, including strikes, delays in the delivery of equipment, lack of oxygen and medicines and so on.
The coronavirus is still not leaving sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the cities, where life is a little more 'western' and the presence of offices and indoor meeting places make it easier to catch the disease, but it is less scary than a year ago. This does not mean that we should lower our guard, but has led the government to decide to reopen schools on May 10th.
In the meantime, in the last 24 hours, the percentage of cases of swabs analysed has risen again, to 18.3%, but there have only been 4 deaths. There has been an increase in the number of people admitted to intensive care units (261) and the number of cures has exceeded 100,000, out of 149,000 positive cases over 13 months.