WHO says two-thirds of Africans have been infected by coronavirus
Study finds wide variations between regions, with seroprevalence ranging from 56.1% in Southern Africa to 75.5% in Middle Africa
Almost two-thirds of Africans had developed coronavirus antibodies by last September, indicating the continent’s infection rate has been much higher than official figures show, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Thursday. It estimated that there had been 800-million infections by the end of the third quarter of 2021, 97 times higher than the 8.2-million recorded cases.
Exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, soared from 3% in June 2020 to 65% in September 2021, the WHO concluded in a meta-analysis of 151 seroprevalence studies published on the preprint server MedRxiv ahead of peer review. Since vaccination coverage in Africa was still very low at this stage, the majority of people who had developed antibodies to the virus would have done so from natural infection...
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