Africa's COVID-19 death toll passes 100,000

Africa has surpassed 100,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 as the continent praised for its early response to the pandemic now struggles with a dangerous resurgence and medical oxygen often runs desperately short.

"I think that is really remarkable and frightening," the director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, told The Associated Press in an interview reflecting on the milestone.

Health officials who breathed a sigh of relief last year when African countries did not see a huge number of COVID-19 deaths are now reporting a jump in fatalities.

Deaths from COVID-19 increased by 40% in Africa in the past month compared to the previous month, the World Health Organization's Africa chief, Matshidiso Moeti, told reporters last week.

That's more than 22,000 people dying in the past four weeks.

But the latest trend shows a slowdown.

In the week ending on Sunday, the continent saw a 28% decrease in deaths, the Africa CDC said Thursday.

The 54-nation continent of some 1.3 billion people has barely seen the arrival of large-scale supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, and a variant of the virus dominant in South Africa is already posing a challenge to vaccination efforts.

Still, if doses are available, the continent should be able to vaccinate 35% to 40% of its population before 2021 and 60% by the end of 2022, Nkengasong said.

Africa reached 100,000 confirmed deaths shortly after marking a year since the first coronavirus infection was confirmed on the continent, in Egypt on February 14, 2020.

But many more people across Africa have died of COVID-19, even though they are not included in the official toll.

Since most countries in Africa lack the means to track mortality data, it is not clear how many excess deaths have occurred across the continent since the pandemic began.

In the unusual case of Tanzania, no one knows how many deaths, or even infections, have occurred since the country of some 60 million people stopped updating its number of cases in April.

But while populist President John Magufuli claims that COVID-19 has been defeated in Tanzania and questions the new vaccines without offering evidence, social media in recent days has seen a worrying increase in death notices by families saying loved ones died while struggling to breathe.

Some had otherwise been healthy.

"He complained of fast-diminishing air in his respiratory system," one death notice in Dar es Salaam said this month.

Tanzania is now one of eight African countries with the more infectious variant of the virus that was first found in South Africa, according to the WHO, citing travellers from Tanzania who were discovered to have the variant overseas.

Nkengasong told the AP that Tanzania's influential first president Julius Nyerer once declared that if Africa is not united, it's doomed.

"I really continue to call on Tanzania to work closely with African Union, Africa CDC and the World Health Organization so that we jointly and collectively address the challenge we have in our hands," he said.