I extracted the analysis from the mail guardian <https://mg.co.za/> article by Alex Broadbent.
He started his article by underlying that there are no available options for containing the spread of COVID-19 that do not have serious economic costs except that we need to listen to expertise, not ill-considered opinion.
Alex Broadbent in his comment depicts that the biggest public health risk in Africa is not COVID-19, but the consequences of regional and global measures designed to reduce its effect on public health.
The cost-benefit analysis of these measures yields a different result in Africa than in Europe, North America and large parts of Asia.
By far the biggest risk factor for serious, critical or fatal COVID-19 is age. Worldometer estimates the case fatality rate in the 10 to 30 age category at 0.2%. Under the age of 10, it’s 0.0%. A recent paper in The Lancet estimated a 0.32% fatality rate in its study population of people aged 60 under and 6.4% death rate for people over the age of 60.
In South Africa, the average male dies before the age of 60, and 3% of the population is over 65. The median age in Africa is 18. In Europe, it’s 42. Africa is the world’s youngest continent, by far.
We must ask, then, whether African nations (including South Africa) have as much reason to fear COVID-19 as regions where so much of the population is older.
Lockdown has immediate ramifications for individuals who live on a hand-to-mouth basis, and for their networks of dependents. If people cannot eat, they will not obey a lockdown; nor is there any reason, practical or moral, for them to do so.
The questions that should be answered in the fight against the pandemic are
Can the global community have really got it so wrong?
Can regional leaders have been so poorly advised?
Why are we taking COVID-19 so seriously, if the threat is so much less serious here than elsewhere, and the costs of lockdown so much greater?
Stefan Swartling Peterson, the chief of health at Unicef, has a theory for the above questions. “COVID now really scares us,” he says. “The difference, to me, is that … it can affect the people with power … the people who communicate, rather than the poor people who have always been dying.”
Lower respiratory tract infection, caused by a prior bacterial or viral disease, is the largest cause of death on the continent. COVID-19 might increase that risk, but it’s hardly something to write home about, and not preferable to the hunger caused by the recession.
As per Alex's expertise, he suggests that regional quarantine may be more effective in Africa, where conurbations are separated by large distances. The benefits of separating at-risk populations also deserve fuller consideration.
In Africa, and other developing regions, older people in urban areas often move back to rural areas. In rural villages, it may be possible to separate older and younger people more easily than in a crowded township or slum, where lockdown is nonsense.
Professor Alex Broadbent is director of the Institute for the Future of Knowledge and professor of philosophy at the University of Johannesburg.
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