My guess is that it's the younger average population in Africa combined with general higher resistance to sickness from lower sanitation standards in some areas.<p>But that's just a guess.<p>Continent Median Age
Europe 42 years
North America 35 years
Oceania 33 years
Asia 31 years
South America 31 years
Africa 18 years<p><a href="https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-median-age-of-every-continent/" rel="nofollow">https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-median-age-of-ev...</a>
This was said about India up until June this year when they were hit. Of course natural immunity (and survivorship bias) kicked in as expected. Maybe that’s what has been happening to SSA, just not in one massive sweep.
Researchers in the article say it's hard to get reliable data, and that South Africa had been hard hit. I wonder how well the infection rate correlates with the latitude and this average temperature. We see seasonality in USA, Europe, etc as it spikes in winter and is less prevalent in summer. Is this why Egypt only reports 1000 cases/day and Indonesia 400/day? Or is it that public health infrastructure isn't capable of accurate reporting?
Another possibility is that many African cultures are highly gregarious and due to the virtual absence of vaccination they’ve long since reached natural herd immunity.<p>Interestingly though the African diaspora was relatively hard hit. The two possibilities that spring to mind is that diasporan behavior patterns are significantly different, or that the mixed population somehow otherwise altered the dynamics.
I'm willing to chalk it up to having vastly stronger immune systems because of the average living conditions on the continent. I know game-meat is popular and given that coronavirus came from bats, it's likely there are a bunch of other zoonotic diseases present that we just haven't profiled. The vast majority of people who get sick with a flu-like illness don't have samples taken to a lab in order to determine if it was caused by a novel virus - especially in Africa.<p>It stands to reason that having antibodies against different kinds of coronaviruses, almost all probably undocumented, would confer protection against COVID-19.
In some places in East Africa, ideas we might marginalize and call "conspiracy theories" in America, like COVID being a fake pandemic, are considered common sense knowledge [0].<p>Ideas and beliefs aren't supposed to influence the actual health of individuals, but they do. This is why modern science takes great care to control for the healing effects of placebo during clinical trials via blind and double-blind protocols. The opposite phenomenon of nocebo, expectations of falling ill leading to physiologically measurable illness, is rarely discussed. These psycho-physiological effects occur independently of personality traits like intelligence and gullibility.[1]<p>---<p>[0] <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/covid-skepticism-and-[vaccine-hesitancy-is-widespread-in-tanzania/ar-AAOb85O" rel="nofollow">https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/covid-skepticism-and-[v...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo</a>
Perhaps it's time to realize that scientists in some fields are not able to use their science for predicting purposes, unlike scientists in other fields. And therefore we should reconsider the use of words like "expert" to differentiate people's qualifications.
As an example, I had a postdoc who works with viruses tell me, at the start of the pandemic, that masks don't make any difference. I laughed it off and went to wear a mask before it was recommended to the public. And yet I was right, in a sense, that they do offer some benefit. And he was just wrong. And yet he was an "expert" in this field. But was he or is his science not effective at giving him the powers to predict?