COVID-19: Should You Believe What ECA Is Saying About Africa

In one of his bestsellers, The Zahir, Paulo Coelho said there are two major problems in life: knowing when to begin and knowing when to stop.

If, for example, Nigeria had closed its borders early on and enforced quarantine for all returning Nigerians, whoever they are, things might have been different today. I’m sure many others would say the same for their own countries as well.

In between knowing when to begin and knowing when to stop, however, an agency of the United Nations, which ought to help Africa find its way out of the present crisis, is bandying figures about COVID-19 that can only compound the continent’s collective misery.

Last week, the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) said between 300,000 and 3.3million Africans may die from coronavirus, and expected us to take the figures like gospel.

The commission gave five different possible scenarios (from no-intervention to suppression using intense social distancing) that could lead to – or mitigate – this catastrophic outcome. It, however, failed disastrously to show the basis for its model on a country-specific basis. That’s unforgivable because no disease impacts a country the same way, much less a continent.

Africa is not a country. Yet, the forecast is a parable that even institutions that are supposed to serve the continent are not immune to biases of how the West treats the continent like a country. It’s also a reminder that Africans can and do treat themselves worse, even without help from outsiders.

How did the ECA arrive at its apocalyptic figures for a continent of 58 countries and a population of 600-750million people, with all its nuances, diversity and complexity, without providing details on a country-by-country basis of how its forecast might happen?

When experts in the US predicted that between 200,000 to 1.7million people could die from coronavirus it was based largely on 1) the impact and profile of previous epidemics, especially the viral ones; 2) how quickly and effectively people respond to precautions, adjust and iterate, and 3) the capacity of the medical healthcare system to respond to the ongoing crisis.

The forecasts in the UK (where 500,000 deaths were initially predicted) and other places also followed similar modelling patterns as those in the US, yet neither the forecast in the US nor that in Britain indicated a uniform impact across individual countries. There’s no European, North American or Asian model.

Notwithstanding, we have seen that even these “informed forecasts” were exaggerated. Whether it was intended or not, the forecasts also helped the countries concerned to buy time to strengthen their healthcare systems while keeping larger and vulnerable segments of the populations on the straight and narrow.

That, obviously, was what the ECA wanted to do with Africa: to sound a warning that we cannot treat with levity a virus that the world is yet to fully understand, much less tame.

But the commission goofed, and we’re not obliged to be led by the nose. Its report, “COVID-19 in Africa: Protecting lives and economies,” showed little respect for the continent’s diversity or evidence about how it arrived at its far-reaching conclusions, at least for the potential hotspots.

 Yet, this is the same commission that should have been on the frontline with fact-based evidence, harnessing original thinking about how to help the continent find its way out.

To be sure, the report highlighted the serious deficiencies in healthcare systems across the continent, which we know.

It highlighted the fragile state of the economies, the danger posed by the pandemic and suggested that the continent’s growth may not only recess by nearly 2.6 percent, Africa may also need $200billion (for its healthcare systems and forbearance) to plug the hole. Again, not surprising.

It reminded us that large segments of the continent’s populations reside in overcrowded urban areas, which increases the risk of transmission, and added that general poverty compounded by poor access to basic sanitary infrastructure and a broken global medical supply chain, could make the continent the world’s capital of COVID-19.

Maybe? Improbable. Africa is not a country. According to WHO, parasite and vector-borne diseases, diarrhea, lower respiratory tract infections, HIV, and Ischaemic heart diseases claim three million African lives yearly.