At a lecture to peers this month, Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director John Nkengasong showed images that once dogged Africa, with a magazine cover declaring it “The Hopeless Continent.”
Then he quoted Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah: “It is clear that we must find an African solution to our problems, and that this can only be found in African unity.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has fractured global relationships, but Nkengasong has helped to steer Africa’s 54 countries into an alliance praised as responding better than some richer countries.
A former US CDC official, he modeled Africa’s version after his ex-employer.
While the world approaches 1 million reported COVID-19 deaths, Africa’s cases have been leveling off. Its 1.4 million confirmed cases are far from what was predicted. Antibody testing is expected to show many more infections, but most cases are asymptomatic. Just over 33,000 deaths are confirmed on the continent of 1.3 billion people.
“Africa is doing a lot of things right the rest of the world isn’t,” said Gayle Smith, a former administrator with the US Agency for International Development.
Africa “is a great story and one that needs to be told,” Smith said.
Nkengasong, whom the Gates Foundation honored yesterday with its Global Goalkeeper Award as a “relentless proponent of global collaboration,” is the continent’s most visible narrator.
The Cameroon-born virologist said that Africa can stand up to COVID-19 if given a chance.
Early modeling assumed “a large number of Africans would just die,” Nkengasong said.
The CDC did not issue projections.
“When I looked at the data and the assumptions, I wasn’t convinced,” he said.
Health experts point to Africa’s youthful population as a factor in why COVID-19 has not taken a larger toll, along with swift lockdowns and the later arrival of the virus.
“Be patient,” Nkengasong said. “There’s a lot we still don’t know.”
He warned against complacency, saying that a single case could spark a new surge.
Leading an agency launched only three years ago, Nkengasong was plunged into the race for medical supplies and now a vaccine. At first, it was a shock.
“The collapse of global cooperation and a failure of international solidarity have shoved Africa out of the diagnostics market,” Nkengasong wrote in the journal Nature in April. “If Africa loses, the world loses.”
Supplies slowly improved and African countries have conducted 13 million tests, enough to cover 1 percent of the continent’s population.
However, the ideal is 13 million tests per month, Nkengasong said.
He and other African leaders are haunted by the memories of 12 million Africans dying during the decade it took for affordable HIV drugs to reach the continent.
That must not happen again, he said.
This week, more world leaders than ever are gathering online for the biggest global endeavor since COVID-19 appeared, the UN General Assembly.
If Nkengasong could address them, he would say this: “We should be very careful that history doesn’t record us on the wrong side of it.”
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