VACCINE APARTHEID

AFRICA IS WITNESSING A SECOND WAVE OF COVID -19, BUT LESS THAN 2 PER CENT OF THE 690 MILLION VACCINE DOSES ADMINISTERED TO DATE GLOBALLY HAVE BEEN IN AFRICA. THE WORLD WILL DO WELL TO REMEMBER THAT NO COUNTRY IS SAFE TILL EVERYONE GETS INOCULATED A report by Kiran Pandey and Vibha Varshney from New Delhi, with Maina Waruru from Kenya; Christophe Hitayezu from Rwanda; Bennett Oghifo from Nigeria; Elsabé Brits from South Africa; and Mekonnen Teshome from Ethiopia

- Kiran Pandey and Vibha Varshney

ONE OF South Africa’s leading virologists and member of the country’s Network for Genomic Surveillance in South Africa (NGS-SA), Carolyn Williamson, still remembers the telephone call in November 2020. “A worried Tulio de Olivera, head of NGS-SA, called me to inform on his discovery of a new variant of the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19. He told me about this variant’s unexpected number of mutations in the spike protein that the virus uses to infect human cells,” he recalls. ngssa had identified the variant, later named 501y.V2, through analysis of 2,882 whole genomes from South Africa. Within a month of the variant's discovery in the Eastern Cape Province of the country, COVID-19 cases spiked. The new variant is up to 50 percent more transmissible, say experts. “By December, this virus variant had essentially replaced the previously circulating ones,” Williamson told Down To Earth (dte). The country formally declared this as the second wave of the pandemic in December 2020. After further investigations, experts estimated that the new wave caused by the variant actually started around October 2020. It was notably rapid in parts of the Eastern Cape, Western Cape and KwaZuluNatal Provinces.

By January 2021, the second wave turned widespread and deadly. According to the World Bank’s Africa Pulse report, released on March 31, 2021, “The number of confirmed cases in South Africa increased from 14,109 per million people on December 10, 2020 to a peak of 24,435 per million people on January 30, 2021. Meanwhile, fatalities grew from 384 per million people to 741 per million people over the same time period.” This was the highest among the 54 African countries.