86% of Covid infections in Africa go unnoticed

CAPE TOWN: Almost 86 per cent of all coronavirus infections in Africa go unnoticed, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported on Thursday.

The WHO puts the number of all infections on the continent at 59 million, over seven times the more than 8 million reported cases.

The high number of unreported cases can be explained by the fact that health facilities have so far focused on testing people with symptoms of the disease, which has led to extensive under-reporting, the WHO said.

"With limited testing, we're still flying blind in far too many communities in Africa ... what we see could just be the tip of the iceberg," said WHO Regional Director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti.

So far, only 70 million Covid-19 tests have been reported on the continent of 1.3 billion people, the WHO said.

By comparison, the United States, with about a third of the population, had conducted more than 550 million tests, while Britain, with less than 10 per cent of Africa's population, had conducted more than 280 million tests, it said.

In total, more than 8.4 million coronavirus cases have been recorded in Africa, including 214,000 deaths.

Less than half of the African countries that have received vaccines have fully vaccinated an average of about 2 per cent of their population, according to WHO data.

TB ON THE RISE

Tuberculosis is on the rise again globally for the first time in a decade, linked to disruptions in access to healthcare because of the Covid pandemic, the WHO said.

The setback has erased years of progress toward tackling the curable disease, which affects millions of people worldwide.

"This is alarming news that must serve as a global wake-up call to the urgent need for investments and innovation to close the gaps in diagnosis, treatment and care for the millions of people affected by this ancient but preventable and treatable disease," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.

In its annual TB report for 2020, the WHO said progress toward eradicating the disease has been made worse thanks to a growing number of cases going undiagnosed and untreated.

The organisation estimates that around 4.1 million people have tuberculosis but have not been diagnosed or officially declared, up sharply from 2.9 million in 2019.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made the situation worse for people with tuberculosis, as health funds have been redirected toward tackling coronavirus and people have struggled to access care because of lockdowns.

There was also a drop in the number of people seeking preventative treatment, it added, from 2.8 million people in 2020, down 21 percent from 2019.

"This report confirms our fears that the disruption of essential health services due to the pandemic could start to unravel years of progress against tuberculosis," Tedros said.

Some 1.5 million people died from TB in 2020, including 214,000 among HIV positive people, according to the report.

That was up from 1.2 million in 2019, 209,000 of them HIV positive.

The increase in the number of TB deaths occurred mainly in the 30 countries with the highest burden of tuberculosis, it added.

Tuberculosis is the second deadliest infectious disease after Covid-19, caused by a bacteria that most often affects the lungs.

Like Covid, it is transmitted by air by infected people, for example by coughing.

Most TB cases occur in just 30 countries, many of them poorer nations in Africa and Asia, and more than half of all new cases are in adult men. Women account for 33 percent of cases and children 11 percent.

The WHO's aim is to reduce deaths from TB by 90 percent, and the incidence rate by 80 percent by 2030 compared to 2015, but the latest figures threaten to jeopardise the strategy, it said.

And its modelling suggest the number of people developing the disease and dying from it could be "much higher in 2021 and 2022".

The report said that the number of people newly diagnosed and cases reported to national authorities fell from 7.1 million in 2019 to 5.8 million in 2020.

India, Indonesia, the Philippines and China were the main countries that saw a drop in reported cases.

These and 12 other countries accounted for 93 percent of the total global decrease in notifications.

Global spending on tuberculosis diagnosis, treatment and prevention services fell from $5.8 billion in 2019 to $5.3 billion a year later, the report found. The 2020 figure was less than half of the global funding target for the disease.

About 85 percent of people who develop TB disease can be successfully treated within six months with the right drugs, which also helps to prevent transmission of the illness. -- dpa/AFP