What about Africa?

A curious graph from the June 28th VRBPAC meeting

One of the problems with the VRBPAC meetings is the sheer amount of information coming at everyone so quickly. It’s hard to get a grip on it all.

Today, I’d like to put some attention on this one interesting graph that was briefly passed over during the presentation on the current epidemiology of COVID-19.

It’s a pretty scary looking graph, isn’t it? The spikes in Europe, the Americas and the Western Pacific during the omicron wave are certainly frightening and the total numbers of cases and death are staggering.

But here’s a question: Where is Africa on this graph?

The key lists it there in dark blue. But where is it? I sure can’t see it. But happily, this graph comes from the WHO’s COVID data page, a place I had never ventured before, but has a stunning amount of information available.

One of the things you can play with is just highlighting different regions - like Africa.

See the proportion of cases in the world from Africa below:

Even highlighted, it is almost impossible to see. This is a continent that is home to 1.3 billion people, ~1/6th of the world’s population, yet it accounts for only 1.6% of cases.

In the next graph, we see that Africa, with ~1/6th of the world’s population, only accounts for ~2.9% of the world’s ‘covid’ deaths.

Yet even with these pretty stunningly clear graphs, during this same VRBPAC meeting, Dr. Peter Marks still cited a modeling study, highlighting the ‘importance’ of getting injections to all of the ‘low-income’ countries. The ‘low-income countries’ aren’t suffering from COVID, according to the WHO data - it’s the wealthiest countries on Earth that are by far dominating the numbers, the countries with the ‘best’ medical care, and, of course, the highest injection rates.

The truth is right there, blindingly obvious for all to see, and with their own data and yet still so many refuse to see it.