How a Zambian morgue is exposing the real covid toll in Africa

Outside experts say that the BU team's work has had a significant impact on Africa. There was an equal balance between those who believed there was a balance and those who did not.

He says that the Zambia study shifted the narrative toward the latter idea. Uganda's Kirenga says the study meshes with his observations. The special covid-19 advisor to the president of the country believes that the Pandemic has not been as deadly as expected. There is no doubt that a lot of people who died of covid were not diagnosed.

Survivors—and algorithms—concur

A growing body of nonclinical studies has added heft to the assertion that a majority of Africa's deaths have been missed. A paper published in The Lancet in May of last year found that less than half of the patients who were admitted to critical-care facilities in 10 African countries died within a month. According to the paper, excess in-hospital mortality of 11 to 23 deaths per 100 patients compared with the global average is a figure they link to insufficient staffing and the frequent absence of life-saving interventions.

Baron Nkonde was in the hospital lab.

The locals told me that the treatment gaps in Zambia were acute. Many community members who fell ill during the height of the epidemic viewed hospital admission as a ticket to the mortuary, according to Sky Banda, a 58-year-old resident of Kaunda Square.

Onechi Lwenje, a 36-year-old film maker who spent a week in the covid-19 ward at UTH during the second wave of the country's healthcare reform, says staff were so overwhelmed that some patients would die.

The theory of substantial undercounting is supported by attempts to approximate excess mortality through statistical workarounds. Africa has seen more than one million excess deaths since the start of the Pandemic, according to a machine-learning model developed by The Economist. A model from the University of Washington's Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, included in a paper published by The Lancet in March, puts the number as of December 2021, at 2.1 million for sub-Saharan Africa alone.