By all objective public health and socio-economic measures, the continent of Africa should be a basket case in coping with the pandemic. And yet the burden of COVID-19 is far less in Africa, compared to the most affluent regions of the world outside of Africa. African countries combined have had just a little over 4.1 million cases and about 110,000 COVID-19 deaths in a population of 1.3 billion people. So how did Africa as a region or continent escape the calamity of this pandemic? If we generalize these findings to the African population, it means many people in Africa could be infected and spreading COVID-19 without knowing it.
