Driven by the take the new Corona variant Omikron the Infection numbers in Africa are increasing rapidly. With Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, Omikron has now been identified in four countries on the continent, stressed John Nkengasong from the African Union’s health organization (Africa CDC) on Thursday. In the whole of Africa 52,300 new infections were counted in the past week – that is an increase of 105 percent compared to the previous week. South Africa accounted for 31,000 new infections. According to Nkengasong, it is still unknown how many people would have been infected with the new Omikron variant.
“We are definitely concerned about the situation in southern Africa,” he said. The supply situation with vaccines is improving, but they are not being administered quickly enough. In Africa, only seven percent of the population are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. The continent has now procured 417.5 million doses, of which only 235.8 million have been administered. According to the CDC, a total of around 8.6 million infections have been documented in Africa so far, of which more than 223,000 were fatal. According to experts, the number of unreported cases is likely to be higher on the continent with its 1.3 billion people.