The daily average across the continent was 10,300 last week, up from 11,000 last week, Dr. John Nkengasong said at a press conference, adding that officials received the news with “cautious optimism.”
“We must slowly bend the curve, ” he said.
“It is very, very early. We are dealing with a very sensitive virus that is spreading very quickly, but we must recognize those slight trends that are positive.”
Africa had recorded 1,147,369 cases on Thursday morning, almost part of them in South Africa, which ranks fifth in the world.
The number of cases shown in South Africa has fallen from a peak of more than 12,000 to an average of 5,000, resulting in a decrease in the continental average.
But Nkengasong noted Thursday that West and Central African countries were showing “similar trends.”
“It’s something we’re doing well on the continent,” he said.
“We take this news with cautious optimism because we need the rest of our people to continue not to show what we call preventive fatigue.”
Nkengasong also announced Thursday that Africa had exceeded the control threshold of 10 million COVID-19, suggesting that progress has been made to address the continent’s abundant control constraints.
However, he acknowledged that it is still far below what is needed to give a complete picture of how the pandemic is progressing on the continent.
CDC Africa announced last week that large-scale antibody testing would begin and that seven countries would participate in the first phase: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Morocco.
Even with limited data, African fitness officials are increasingly confident that maximum instances of coronavirus are asymptomatic (Nkengasong estimated the ratio between 70 and 80%) and that the deaths are low, Nkengasong said.
“Of course, our DeathArray … they are not as high as in other parts of the world,” he said, noting that official knowledge puts the mortality rate at 2.3% and that there is little evidence that this figure is wrong.
“We’re starting to feel comforted by this figure,” he said.