Alet Pretorius
According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in sub-Saharan Africa, not only do many children lose their parents and grandparents, but they are also exposed to stress, more frequent abuse in the home environment, social isolation and educational setbacks.
“Covid-19 was a devastating setback for education – according to Unicef estimates, around nine million children in eastern and southern Africa never returned to schools when they reopened,” said Unicef spokesman James Elder on Friday. Since the beginning of the year, 50 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have slipped into extreme poverty.
The continent is currently showing strong increases in the number of proven new corona cases. In Namibia – which recorded the highest death rate on the continent last week – the health infrastructure is on the verge of its capacity, warns Unicef. This also applies to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa – there, in the particularly hard hit metropolitan area around Pretoria and Johannesburg, the number of new infections every day is now approaching the 11,000 mark.
In Uganda, the number of infections rose by 2,800 percent between March and June. “The availability of oxygen is becoming a matter of life and death in Uganda,” said Elder. According to Unicef, Africa accounts for only 1.5 percent of the vaccine doses administered worldwide to date.
The corona virus initially spread relatively slowly across the continent. A total of around 5.3 million infections have been documented in Africa so far, and almost 140,000 people have died as a result. According to experts, the number of unreported cases on the continent with 1.3 billion inhabitants could be significantly higher.