摘要：Despite having all the attributes indicating a much higher expected severity, African countries havesurprisingly much fewer cases of sickness and death from coronavirus disease, officially COVID-19.As of 30 June 2020, Africa, with 1.3 billion population, had 414,011 cases and less than 10,260COVID-19 deaths compared to more than 2.6 million cases and over 126,000 deaths in the US alonewith 330 million population (World Health Organization, 2020a). Struggling to explain theseunusually low rates in Africa, researchers have listed inadequate testing, the younger demographicsof African countries, and previous experience with pandemics. In fact, some researchers havesuggested that Africa will ride out the storm of COVID-19 (OmangaandOndigo, 2020) and, in theprocess, can teach the developed world a few things about fighting pandemics (Moore, 2020). Thisopinion paper interrogates these conflicting viewpoints and provides insights for explaining theAfrican COVID-19 anomaly.
