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. 2020 Dec;93(6):420.e1-420.e6.
doi: 10.1016/j.anpede.2020.11.001. Epub 2020 Nov 4.

COVID-19 and Africa: Surviving between a rock and a hard place

Maite de Aranzabal  1   2 , Victoria Fumadó  3   4 , Iñaki Alegria  5   6   7 , Mercedes Rivera  8   9 , Nuria Torre  10   11 , Belen Guibert  12 , María José Muñoz  13 , Cinta Moraleda  14   15 , Quique Bassat  3   4   16   17   18 ; en representación del Grupo de Cooperación internacionalde la Asociación Española de Pediatría (AEP)
Affiliations

COVID-19 and Africa: Surviving between a rock and a hard place

Maite de Aranzabal et al. An Pediatr (Engl Ed). 2020 Dec.

Abstract
in English, Spanish

With over 575,000 deaths and about 13.3 million cases globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a terrible impact globally during the 6 months since cases were first detected in China. Conscious of the many challenges presented in settings with abundance of resources and with robust health systems, where mortality has been significant and transmission difficult to control, there was a logical concern to see how the virus could impact African countries, and their fragile and weak health systems. Such an anticipated "tsunami", with potentially devastating consequences, seems however to not have yet arrived, and African countries, albeit witnessing an increasing degree of autochthonous transmission, seem to this day relatively unaffected by the pandemic. In this article we review the current situation of the pandemic in the African continent, trying to understand the determinants of its slow progress.

Con más de 575.000 muertes y cerca de 13.3 millones de casos a nivel global, la pandemia por COVID-19 ha causado un terrible impacto en apenas medio año de evolución desde que por primera vez fuesen detectados casos en China. Conscientes de las dificultades planteadas en entornos con sistemas de salud robustos, donde la mortalidad ha sido significativa, y la transmisión difícilmente controlable, había una lógica preocupación por ver cómo el virus podría afectar a los países africanos, donde sus frágiles sistemas de salud auguraban un impacto aún mayor. Este “tsunami” anunciado, de potenciales consecuencias devastadoras, parece sin embargo no haber llegado todavía, y los países africanos, donde ya se ha evidenciado una creciente transmisión, no están viendo el impacto en la salud de sus habitantes que muchos habían predicho. En este artículo repasamos la situación actual de la pandemia en el continente Africano, intentando entender los determinantes de su lenta progresión.

Keywords: Africa; COVID-19; Epidemiology; Low-income countries; Pandemic.

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