As Europe, Australia and Asia prepare for life on the other side of the coronavirus curve, Africa likely hasn’t hit peak COVID-19 infections. With limited testing, food insecurity and unenforceable social distancing measures, Crikey takes a look at some of the scenes in Africa.
Poor people will prefer the lottery of infection over the certainty of starvation.
Africa has so far been spared the worst of the coronavirus. That could soon change, Vox
‘Social distancing’ is next to impossible when a settlement can have just 380 toilets for 20,000 people.
Coronavirus an ‘existential threat’ to Africa and her crowded slums, The Conversation
The coronavirus has sometimes been called an equalizer because it has sickened both rich and poor, but when it comes to food, the commonality ends.
‘Instead of coronavirus, the hunger will kill us.’ A global food crisis looms, The New York Times
Across the continent rumours have been rife that the virus does not affect black people. This was fuelled partly by the fact that a Cameroonian student in China, who was among the first people to contract the disease, responded well to treatment.
Debunking 9 popular myths doing the rounds in Africa about the coronavirus, The Conversation
We feel like sacrificial lambs for no reason. The plan was to keep the people safe by sacrificing us.
Africans in China: We face coronavirus discrimination, BBC
Good survey. The Vox article is especially comprehensive – sets out the problems as well as the hopeful points.
As one who has an interest in Africa I hope for the best.
But none of those links actually illustrate any dire straits situations, so far at least. Africans have long realized that anything that white people do on their behalf is never for their benefit and usually to their detriment. During the ebola crisis in East Africa a team of WHO workers trying to introduce a vaccine program were stoned to death. In Ethiopia at the moment any foreigners black or white trying to introduce immunization are also being attacked.
You have two choices
The religious view, popular in Africa, that god controls everything, and it doesn’t matter which god you follow, the final conclusion will be that god really hates Africans
The alternative is that Africa has pissed 500 to 1000 years up against the wall, not educating it’s people, not emancipating them, not taking it’s place in the future.
This is not a popular view, but it is why the West has the money, and will survive COVID 19 less worse. yes we are villages, we have our idiots, Donald J, and Boris your elected, but we will make the post COVID future. If you want to take your place in the future, educate your people, and invest the profits in educating your people. In the past Africa has fed its population, in the future it can, Africa’s call
Given all the previous bedwetting about the unknown diseases lurking in the Dark Continent about to break out and devastate the West, this curve ball, like HIV, seems to have come from outside.
Odd that. Not as if many of the (53 at last count) countries there are high on most the jetsets’ itinerary.