IN as much as Zimbabwe’s deaths from COVID-19 are relatively lower than those being recorded in other parts of the world, indications on the ground are that there is a high possibility that whoever gets infected has a greater chance of succumbing to the virus.
By Michael Gwarisa
Speaking to Journalists, Immunologist and Public Health expert, Dr Tinashe Gede said the country has of late been battling highly virulent COVID-19 strains, hence the high case fatality.
On a relative scale, as a Continent, Africa has been relatively spared in terms of the ravages of COVID-19 to the extent that even among scientists, there is a lot of questions as to why has Africa with fundamentally weaker structural setups done perhaps a little bit better than other parts of the world that are wealthier and more organized.
“Even having said that, within Zimbabwe, we have had well over 37,000 confirmed cases over the past year and at least 1700 confirmed deaths of COVID-19. Now the number off themselves don’t seem off the charts when you compare to other parts of the world. But what you need to realize is that there is thing called the Case Fatality rate which means that who is confirmed as having COVID-19 go on to succumb or die from COVID-19. When you look at the case fatality rate, Zimbabwe’s reported case fatality rate at 4.1% is actually one of the highest in the world,” said Dr Gede.
He added that even though Zimbabwe has not had as nearly as many infections in the world, every infection that has been recorded in Zimbabwe has unfortunately had a much higher risk of leading to death than many other parts of the world.
“Part of that speaks to our fundamentally weaker health infrastructure and our care systems which was not as prepared as it should have been. We have looked for time trends to say are we getting better, but I think if you have been looking at the weekly situation reports, our fatalities have not dramatically dropped.
“Our ability to care for COVID-19 have not improved as we would have wanted and what we have known for a while is that perhaps the best chance for weaker health systems like our own as much is prevention as possible. And in the whole prevention efforts, the development of COVID-19 vaccines is a very welcome development.”
Early this year, Zimbabwe’s cabinet announced that close to 60% of the COVID-19 infections being recorded in the country were as a result of the highly virulent South African strain. There is an ongoing genomic sequencing system in the country which shows that 60-70% of infections are from the South African variant while 30 is of a different variant which scientists have termed the Zimbabwean variant and the variant according to Dr Gede is a hodge-podge of different variants from various countries that have somehow intermixed.
“The Zimbabwean variant is a bit of an admixture between all kinds of variants from different parts of the world and nobody knows how bad that is,” added Dr Gede.
Meanwhile, Molecular Epidemiologist at Zimbabwe’s National Microbiology Reference Laboratory, Tapfumaneyi Mashe said 60 countries including Zimbabwe have so far recorded cases of the B.1.351 or South African variant and it was spreading so fast and studies were still underway to ascertain its prevalence in the forthcoming winter season.
