'Brutal' third wave hits Africa as vaccination slows

With unprecedented hospital admissions and health facilities getting pushed to the brink by a rising number of fatalities, Africa is facing a resurgence of coronavirus.

Although the continent is falling behind in the global COVID-19vaccination drive, after Oceania it is still the world’s least affected continent. For a population of 13 billion, Africa has had just under 5.3 million reported cases and around 139,000 deaths.

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The continent has escaped a fate similar to India or Brazil, but the pandemic is resurging fast.

Matshidiso Moeti, Africa director for World Health Organization (WHO) warned that "The third wave is picking up speed, spreading faster, hitting harder," and "The latest surge threatens to beAfrica's worst yet".

While John Nkengasong, the director of AfricaCentres for Disease Control and Prevention (AfricaCDC) uses the words "extremely brutal" and "very devastating" to describe the third wave.

George Weah, Liberia's president, warned that as the hospitals continue to overflow in his country, the wave appears to be "far more alarming than a year ago".

The spread of more transmissible variants like Delta, immunisation hitches along with winter in the southern hemisphere, are aggravating Africa's third wave.

First detected in India, the Delta variant has been reported in 14 African countriesso far, and according to WHO, it makes up the bulk of new cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Doctors in SouthAfrica are struggling with an unprecedented rise in patients' numbers. The country accounts for around 35 per cent of all reported cases.

However, unlike past waves, this time "the hospital system is not coping," said doctors' association chief Angelique Coetzee.

With hospital admissions increasing by approximately 60 per cent since early April, SouthAfrica's average new daily infections have increased 15 times.

'Unprecedented' deaths in Zambia

The countries Namibia and Zambia are also witnessing steep infection curves.

While Africa CDC says that the country is overwhelmed. An "unprecedented" number of COVID-19 deaths have been piling pressure on mortuaries says Zambia's health ministry.

With similar trends in Uganda, Health Minister Jane Ruth Acheng blamed highly infectious variants for the new spread, "different from the second wave" with a large number of young people hospitalised.

Civil societies report that the country is facing an oxygen shortfall amounting to 24.5 million litres per day, an allegation denied by Acheng. However, the fact remains, Uganda is facing oxygen shortages.

Governments are once again tightening restrictions. Uganda has imposed a new nationwide lockdown and 13 Kenyan counties have adopteda tougher curfew.

At the same time, the pace of vaccinations is struggling to get off the ground.

According to the WHO, in the lowest ratio worldwide, only about one per cent of the continent's population is fully vaccinated and90 per cent of African nations are expected to miss a target to inoculate a tenth of their populations by September.

"We are running a race behind time, the pandemic is ahead of us. We are not winning inAfricathis battle against the virus," saidAfricaCDC's Nkengasong.

"It's frightening what is going on on the continent," he added.

Vaccination failures

While recently western leaders have pledged to donate one billion vaccine doses to poorer countries, the process has been too slow.

Cases are "outpacing vaccinations", Moeti said. "Africaurgently needs a million more vaccines. We need a sprint".

Due to vaccine hesitancy and logical failures, several countries failed to administer jabs from the UN-backed Covax scheme before their use-by date.

In May, Malawi destroyed almost 20,000 expired AstraZeneca doses, and now just as thousand were due for their second shot the country exhausted its vaccine stocks last week.

DRC and South Sudan had to return about two million shots to the UN to avoid facing this scenario like Malawi.

Chinese vaccines face a slow take-up and a surge in AstraZeneca's main supplier country, India, has delayed Covax deliveries toAfrica.

After Harare’s mail vaccination centre ran out of shots last month hundreds of frustrated Zimbabweans staged a protest.

Even as SouthAfricasays that it has secured enough Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines to immunise 67 per cent of its 59 million inhabitants, due to rollout setbacks so far only 2.2 million people, mostly healthcare workers and over 60s, have received a jab so far.

"The lack of vaccines in a region with high levels of poverty and inequality means many people feel they are just waiting to die," said Amnesty International's regional director Deprose Muchena.

(With inputs from agencies)