As of November 18, 2022, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Africa amounted to around 12.7 million, which represented around two percent of the infections around the world. By the same date, coronavirus cases globally were over 640 million, deaths were over six million, while approximately 620 million people recovered from the disease. On the African continent, South Africa was the most drastically affected country, with more than 3.6 million infections.

The African continent fighting the pandemic  

The African continent first came in contact with the coronavirus pandemic on February 14, 2020, in the northernmost part, particularly Egypt. Since then, the different governments took severe restrictive measures to try to curb the spread of the disease. Moreover, the official numbers of the African continent are significantly lower than those of Europe, North America, South America, and Asia. Nevertheless, the infectious disease still managed to have its effects on several countries. South Africa had the highest number of deaths. Morocco and Tunisia, the second and third most affected in Africa, recorded 16,002 and 27,824 deaths, respectively, while Egypt registered at 24,132 as of March 02, 2022.

The light at the end of the tunnel  

Although the African countries still have a long way to fully combat the virus, vaccination programs have been rolled out in the majority of Africa. Also, according to a survey, public opinion in several African countries shows a high willingness to be vaccinated, with Ethiopia having numbers as high as 94 percent. As of March 2022, Egypt was the country administering the highest number of vaccine doses, however, Seychelles had the highest per rate per 100 people .

Method

The dataset contains several confirmed COVID-19 cases, number of deaths, and death rate in six regions. The objective of the study is to compare the number of confirmed cases in Africa to other regions.

Death rate = Total number of deaths from COVID-19 divided by the Total Number of infected patients.

The study provides evidence for the country-level in six regions by the World Health Organisation's classification.

Findings

Based on the descriptive data provided above, we conclude that the lack of tourism is one of the key reasons why COVID-19 reported cases are low in Africa compared to other regions. We also justified this claim by providing evidence from the economic freedom index, which indicates that the vast majority of African countries recorded a low index for a business environment. On the other hand, we conclude that the death rate is higher in the African region compared to other regions. This points to issues concerning health-care expenditure, low capacity for testing for COVID-19, and poor infrastructure in the region.

Apart from COVID-19, there are significant pre-existing diseases, namely; Malaria, Flu, HIV/AIDS, and Ebola in the continent. This study, therefore, invites the leaders to invest massively in the health-care system, infrastructure, and human capital in order to provide a sustainable environment for today and future generations. Lastly, policy uncertainty has been a major issue in determining a sustainable development goal on the continent. This uncertainty has differentiated Africa to other regions in terms of stepping up in the time of global crisis.

As of November 18, 2022, the overall deaths due to coronavirus (COVID-19) in Africa reached 257,984. South Africa recorded the highest number of casualties. With over 100,000 deaths, the country accounted for roughly 40 percent of the total. Tunisia was the second most affected on the continent, as the virus made almost 30,000 victims in the nation, around 11 percent of the overall deaths in Africa. Egypt accounted for around 10 percent of the casualties on the continent, with 24,600 victims. By the same date, Africa had recorded more than 12 million cases of COVID-19.

Surgo Ventures' Africa CCVI ranks 756 regions across 48 African countries on their vulnerability—or their ability to mitigate, treat, and delay transmission of the coronavirus. Vulnerability is assessed based on many factors grouped into seven themes: socioeconomic status, population density, access to transportation and housing; epidemiological factors; health system factors; fragility; and age. The index reflects risk factors for COVID-19, both in terms of clinical outcomes and socioeconomic impact.

The Africa CCVI is the only index to measure vulnerability to COVID-19 within most countries in Africa at this level of detail. The index is modular to reflect the reality that vulnerability is a multi-dimensional construct, and two regions could be vulnerable for very different reasons. This allows stakeholders to customize pandemic responses informed by vulnerability on each dimension. For example, policymakers can identify areas for scaling up COVID-19 testing that are more vulnerable on theme two - population density - or direct community health workers or mobile health units to areas that are vulnerable due to weak health systems infrastructure. The modularity of the Africa CCVI can help governments design lean and precise responses for subnational regions during each phase of the pandemic.

Data files:

Africa_CCVI_subnational_zenodo.csv: Africa CCVI and seven themes' scores for 756 administrative level-1 regions across 48 countries

Africa_CCVI_country_zenodo.csv: Africa CCVI and seven themes scores across 36 countries (12 countries excluded as country-specific data sources were used for them)

DHS_raw_indicators_Zenodo.csv: this CSV contains indicator data for 36 countries, data was primarily sourced from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in addition to other sources (listed in accvi-data-sources.xlsx)

non_DHS_raw_indicators_Zenodo.csv: 12 countries that did not have a recent DHS, so we used country-specific surveys, MICS UNICEF, and other sources (listed in accvi-data-sources.xlsx)

accvi-data-sources.xlsx: data sources used for ACCVI indicators

zenodo_data_dictionary.csv: names and definitions of variables used in data files

Background: More than 1 year after the beginning of the international spread of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), the reasons explaining its apparently lower reported burden in Africa are still to be fully elucidated. Few studies previously investigated the potential reasons explaining this epidemiological observation using data at the level of a few African countries. However, an updated analysis considering the various epidemiological waves and variables across an array of categories, with a focus on African countries might help to better understand the COVID-19 pandemic on the continent. Thus, we investigated the potential reasons for the persistently lower transmission and mortality rates of COVID-19 in Africa.Methods: Data were collected from publicly available and well-known online sources. The cumulative numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths per 1 million population reported by the African countries up to February 2021 were used to estimate the transmission and mortality rates of COVID-19, respectively. The covariates were collected across several data sources: clinical/diseases data, health system performance, demographic parameters, economic indicators, climatic, pollution, and radiation variables, and use of social media. The collinearities were corrected using variance inflation factor (VIF) and selected variables were fitted to a multiple regression model using the R statistical package.Results: Our model (adjusted R-squared: 0.7) found that the number of COVID-19 tests per 1 million population, GINI index, global health security (GHS) index, and mean body mass index (BMI) were significantly associated (P < 0.05) with COVID-19 cases per 1 million population. No association was found between the median life expectancy, the proportion of the rural population, and Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) coverage rate. On the other hand, diabetes prevalence, number of nurses, and GHS index were found to be significantly associated with COVID-19 deaths per 1 million population (adjusted R-squared of 0.5). Moreover, the median life expectancy and lower respiratory infections rate showed a trend towards significance. No association was found with the BCG coverage or communicable disease burden.Conclusions: Low health system capacity, together with some clinical and socio-economic factors were the predictors of the reported burden of COVID-19 in Africa. Our results emphasize the need for Africa to strengthen its overall health system capacity to efficiently detect and respond to public health crises.

As of July 11, 2022, the cumulative number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in East Africa reached over 1.39 million. Ethiopia and Kenya were the most affected countries in the Eastern area of the African continent.

In past 24 hours, Africa had N/A new cases, N/A deaths and N/A recoveries.

Context

Late in December 2019, the World Health Organisation (WHO) China Country Office obtained information about severe pneumonia of an unknown cause, detected in the city of Wuhan in Hubei province, China. This later turned out to be the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) of the coronavirus family. The disease causes respiratory illness characterized by primary symptoms like cough, fever, and in more acute cases, difficulty in breathing. WHO later declared COVID-19 as a Pandemic because of its fast rate of spread across the Globe with over 5.9 Million confirmed cases and over 365,000 deaths as of May 30, 2020. The African continent started confirming its first cases of COVID-19 in late January and early February of 2020 in some of its countries. The disease has since spread across all the 54 African countries with over 135,000 confirmed cases and over 3,900 deaths as of May 30, 2020.

Content

The COVID-19 Africa dataset contains daily level information about the COVID-19 cases in Africa since January 27th, 2020. It is a time-series data and the number of cases on any given day is cumulative. The original datasets can be found on this John Hopkins University Github repository. The R script that I used to prepare this dataset is also available on my Github repository. I will be updating the COVID-19 Africa dataset on a daily basis, with every update from John Hopkins University.

Field description

• ObservationDate: Date of observation in YY/MM/DD
• Country: name of an African country
• Region: Region of the African country
• Confirmed: the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases
• Deaths: the number of deaths from COVID-19
• Recovered: the number of recovered cases
• Active: the number of people still infected with COVID-19 Note: Active = Confirmed - (Deaths + Recovered)

Acknowledgements

1. John Hopkins University for making COVID-19 datasets available to the public: https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/tree/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_daily_reports
2. John Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
3. COVID-19 Africa dashboard: http://covid-19-africa.sen.ovh/
4. SRk for uploading a global COVID-19 dataset on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/sudalairajkumar/novel-corona-virus-2019-dataset#covid_19_data.csv
5. United Nations Department of General Assembly and Conference Management: https://www.un.org/depts/DGACM/RegionalGroups.shtml
6. United Nations Subregions of Africa: https://pitt.libguides.com/c.php?g=12378&p=65814
7. wallpapercave.com: https://wallpapercave.com/covid-19-wallpapers

Inspiration

Possible Insights 1. The current number of COVID-19 cases in Africa 2. The current number of COVID-19 cases by country 3. The number of COVID-19 cases in Africa / African country(s) by May 30, 2020 (Any future date)

Daily Covid-19 cases in african countries : daily infections, recoveries and deaths and cumulative cases of infections, recoveries and deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.

Covid-19 recoveries in Africa, per country, per day from the beginning of the pandemic. Source : national governments.

Covid-19 cumulative deaths in Africa, per country, per day from the beginning of the pandemic. Source : national governments.

Covid-19 infected cases in Africa, per country, per day from the beginning of the pandemic. Source : national governments.

As of March 15, 2023, Seychelles was the African country with the highest coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccination rate, with around 205 doses administered per 100 individuals. Mauritius and Rwanda followed with 201 and 190 doses per 100 people, respectively. Ranking fourth, Morocco had a vaccination rate of approximately 148 doses per 100 people, registering the third-highest number of inoculations after Egypt and Nigeria. In South Africa, the most affected country on the continent, the vaccination rate instead reached around 64 per 100 population.

How did Africa obtain the vaccines?

Vaccines in Africa were obtained in different ways. African nations both purchased new doses and received them from other countries. At the beginning of the vaccination campaigns, donations came from all over the world, such as China, the United Arab Emirates, India, and Russia. The United Nations-led COVAX initiative provided Oxford/AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech doses to several African countries. Within this program, the continent received nearly 270 million doses as of January 2022. Moreover, the vaccination campaign has also been an occasion for intra-African solidarity. Senegal has, for instance, donated vaccines to the Gambia, while in January 2021, Algeria announced that it would have shared its supply with Tunisia.

COVID-19 impact on the African economy

The spread of COVID-19 negatively affected socio-economic growth in Africa, with the continent’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contracting significantly in 2020. Specifically, Southern Africa experienced the sharpest decline, at minus six percent, followed by North Africa at minus 1.7 percent. Most of Africa’s key economic sectors were hit by the pandemic. The drop in global oil prices led to a crisis in the oil and gas sector. Nigeria, the continent’s leading oil-exporting country, witnessed a considerable decrease in crude oil trade in 2020. Moreover, the shrinking number of international tourist arrivals determined a loss of over 12 million jobs in Africa’s travel and tourism sector. Society has also been substantially affected by COVID-19 on the poorest continent in the world, and the number of people living in extreme poverty was estimated to increase by around 30 million in 2020.

This dataset consists of data from various organisations and datasets that were used in creating the Africa Covid-19 vulnerability index

This file contains the aggregated dataset that was the basis of this paper ' Reasons for Low Burden of COVID-19 in Africa: An Explorative Cross-Sectional Analysis of Twenty-One African Countries from January to June 2020.'

The number of Vaccines received and being administered in different countries. Data from WHO - Africa COVID-19 Dashboard, 2021

The Middle East and Africa COVID-19 diagnostics market is being aided by the growing number of COVID-19 patients, which has reached over 2.76 million people within the MENA region as per November 2020.

This dataset represents COVID-19 call data from a supplemental grant within HAALSI using a subset of participants. Calls for the COVID-19 Supplement were conducted from July 19, 2021, to March 8, 2022. Every respondent who participated in the first wave of HAALSI (i.e., the original HAALSI cohort of 5,059) and was still living at the time the Wave 3 sample was drawn (in June 2021, based on the latest data from HAALSI follow-up calls/visits) was included in this sample (n=4,088). This COVID-19 Supplement survey was launched at approximately the same time as the Wave 3 survey. Nineteen percent of the sample was deceased at the time of data collection (n=971), and of these, 159 had died between the drawing of the sample and the contact attempt for the COVID Supplement. Of the remaining 4,088 living individuals, 2,698 completed the supplement (65.9% response rate).

South Africa recorded 102595 Coronavirus Deaths since the epidemic began, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In addition, South Africa reported 4072533 Coronavirus Cases. This dataset includes a chart with historical data for South Africa Coronavirus Deaths.

This dataset provides values for CORONAVIRUS CASES reported in several countries. The data includes current values, previous releases, historical highs and record lows, release frequency, reported unit and currency.