Fight Covid-19 but don’t forget known silent killers on the prowl
A zero is nearly always nothing to be proud of—unless it stands beside another digit on the right. But since the Covid-19 pandemic started wreaking havoc across the world, countries that have so far had zero coronavirus-related deaths to report are to be envied.
Doom merchants and medical experts have been saying that Africa is likely to have one of the highest death tolls imaginable, but it remains the continent with several countries that have reported zero coronavirus-related deaths.
At the time of writing this article, Eritrea, the Central African Republic (CAR), Namibia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Seychelles, South Sudan and Uganda were among those countries.
This is truly remarkable considering that these countries are not known to have robust healthcare systems. In fact, some people even argue that the countries in question may be losing people to Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, but they do not have the wherewithal to monitor what is happening on the ground, do not keep records and do not know who is dying from what.
As it is, Africa has had the lowest number of coronavirus-related deaths, according to the World Health Organisation. Its figures indicate that the continent has so far lost 1,926. By contrast, the United States alone has lost 75,744 people—and there are no signs yet that its much vaunted healthcare system is anywhere near bringing the toll down.
That rich countries have been hit hardest by the virus is still something of an enigma. Even in Africa, countries that are economically strong have had equally bad news to report. With 7,808 confirmed cases, South Africa, the continent’s richest country, is the hardest-hit and has the highest death toll.
East Africa’s largest economy, Kenya, has also been hit harder than its neighbours, two of which—South Sudan and Uganda—have yet to report any death.
But while the news from these two countries (and in Africa in general) is not as terrible as we had feared, it masks a huge problem we have failed to deal with in part because we no longer think it is a huge problem.
The problem is ‘old deaths’ caused by existing diseases. They are deaths that happen in large numbers and are preventable, but they are not being effectively prevented because everyone seems to think we can live with them.
The WHO estimates, for example, that deaths from non-communicable diseases (NCDs)—heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer—are likely to increase globally by 17 per cent over the next 10 years, and Africa will experience a 27 per cent increase.
That will translate into 28 million additional deaths from these conditions which are projected to exceed deaths caused by communicable, maternal, perinatal and nutritional diseases combined by 2030.
In Uganda and neighbouring countries, many people in middle age are already battling NCDs. If you count the number of people in Uganda who have died as a result of NCDs in the past couple of years, you are likely to end up with a death toll that is much higher than Africa’s coronavirus toll.
The WHO goes on to say that in some African countries, such as Mauritius, Namibia and Seychelles, NCDs cause over 50 per cent of all reported adult deaths. This implies that NCDs are major leading cause of ill health, disability and premature death.
Governments and people tend to give public health emergencies a higher priority even when they already have killer diseases that are stealing lives in large numbers. But doing little or nothing about existing killer diseases (upon which Covid-19 is piggy-backing) and concentrating on a new emergency because it has everyone gripped by fear and panic is not an effective way of preventing death.
If Uganda does not lose anyone to Covid-19 but ends up losing, say, 500 people to high blood pressure, it means our country has taken one step forward, two steps back.
On April 25, we marked World Malaria Day, but the event went almost unnoticed because everyone was talking about the coronavirus. The dangers of malaria cannot be overestimated, of course. In fact, if statistics are anything to go by, malaria has proven to be more deadly than Covid-19, especially in Africa.
The WHO says most malaria cases in 2018 were in Sub-Saharan Africa (213 million or 93 per cent). Uganda (5 per cent) was among the six countries that accounted for more than half of all malaria cases worldwide: Nigeria (25 per cent), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (12 per cent), Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique and Niger (4 per cent each).
What’s more, an estimated 405,000 people died from malaria globally, and Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 94 per cent of all malaria deaths
The writer is a journalist and former
Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
[email protected]
@kazbuk
