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Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/08/1049107/real-covid-toll-africa-morgue/
How a Zambian morgue is exposing the real covid toll in Africa
One of the pandemic’s enduring mysteries is how much of Africa seemed to have been spared the worst. A study of corpses suggests it hasn’t.
Jonathan W. Rosen
April 8, 2022
The morgue at Lusaka’s University Teaching Hospital (UTH), a sprawling brick facility near the center of Zambia’s capital, is not the most pleasant place to carry out a clinical study. Inside the cavernous interior, newly arrived bodies linger unattended—on rolling metal tables or on the concrete floor wrapped in blankets. Others lie stacked on open-air racks, where some stay unclaimed for months. The stench is overwhelming.
But it is here, among the cadavers at Zambia’s largest hospital, that researchers are finally close to solving one of the pandemic’s enduring mysteries: why Africa appeared to have been spared the brunt of the covid death toll experienced elsewhere. The truth, it increasingly appears, is that it wasn’t.
That’s the claim made by a new study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, based on tests of corpses carried out by staff equipped with nasal swabs and a heavy tolerance for the macabre. It constitutes perhaps the strongest clinical evidence yet that covid-19 deaths in Lusaka, and likely much of Africa, have been vastly undercounted.
Between January and June of 2021, the researchers found that 32% of the dead in the morgue tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. The numbers testing positive rose to 82% during one week of Zambia’s deadliest wave in June. Most had died at home without seeking treatment, and fewer than 10% had tested positive while living—a criterion health authorities required to count them as part of the official covid-19 toll.
Although some of the deceased who were infected with the virus likely died from unrelated causes, interviews with relatives and records of those who’d sought treatment for covid-like symptoms before succumbing suggest that roughly 70% of adult dead testing positive were “probably” or “possibly” victims of covid-19.
And while Lusaka, a city of 3.5 million people at the crossroads of eastern and southern Africa, might not be a perfect proxy for a continent of nearly 1.4 billion, the authors stress that their study’s findings are consistent with a growing body of estimates from other countries in the region: the world, they believe, may have grossly underestimated Africa’s true covid toll.
“Our study punctures the myth that covid-19 skipped Africa,” says Christopher Gill, an infectious disease specialist at the Boston University School of Public Health who was one of the study’s lead authors...
How a Zambian morgue is exposing the real covid toll in Africa
One of the pandemic’s enduring mysteries is how much of Africa seemed to have been spared the worst. A study of corpses suggests it hasn’t.
Jonathan W. Rosen
April 8, 2022
The morgue at Lusaka’s University Teaching Hospital (UTH), a sprawling brick facility near the center of Zambia’s capital, is not the most pleasant place to carry out a clinical study. Inside the cavernous interior, newly arrived bodies linger unattended—on rolling metal tables or on the concrete floor wrapped in blankets. Others lie stacked on open-air racks, where some stay unclaimed for months. The stench is overwhelming.
But it is here, among the cadavers at Zambia’s largest hospital, that researchers are finally close to solving one of the pandemic’s enduring mysteries: why Africa appeared to have been spared the brunt of the covid death toll experienced elsewhere. The truth, it increasingly appears, is that it wasn’t.
That’s the claim made by a new study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, based on tests of corpses carried out by staff equipped with nasal swabs and a heavy tolerance for the macabre. It constitutes perhaps the strongest clinical evidence yet that covid-19 deaths in Lusaka, and likely much of Africa, have been vastly undercounted.
Between January and June of 2021, the researchers found that 32% of the dead in the morgue tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. The numbers testing positive rose to 82% during one week of Zambia’s deadliest wave in June. Most had died at home without seeking treatment, and fewer than 10% had tested positive while living—a criterion health authorities required to count them as part of the official covid-19 toll.
Although some of the deceased who were infected with the virus likely died from unrelated causes, interviews with relatives and records of those who’d sought treatment for covid-like symptoms before succumbing suggest that roughly 70% of adult dead testing positive were “probably” or “possibly” victims of covid-19.
And while Lusaka, a city of 3.5 million people at the crossroads of eastern and southern Africa, might not be a perfect proxy for a continent of nearly 1.4 billion, the authors stress that their study’s findings are consistent with a growing body of estimates from other countries in the region: the world, they believe, may have grossly underestimated Africa’s true covid toll.
“Our study punctures the myth that covid-19 skipped Africa,” says Christopher Gill, an infectious disease specialist at the Boston University School of Public Health who was one of the study’s lead authors...
