Tackling COVID-19: Can the African continent play the long game?

Abstract

Events have progressed with dizzying rapidity since the World Health Organization (WHO) was first alerted to cases of severe pneumonia in the Wuhan City of China on December 31st 2019. The novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was declared a pandemic on March 11th 2020. As of April 7th, a total of 1.38 million cases of COVID-19 had been diagnosed globally with over 78 000 deaths attributable to the disease [1]. Comparisons have been drawn between COVID-19 and other deadly pandemics such as the 1918 Spanish flu that infected about one-third of the world’s population, killed 40-50 million people and changed the course of history [2]. While it is premature to judge the final death toll of COVID-19, the global response to the pandemic will determine how bad it becomes.