28 March 2022

Media Fail

It looks like the New York Times has a narrative about the Covid-19 numbers in Africa that they decided to push despite ……… you know ……… the facts, as shown by their article, "Trying to Solve a Covid Mystery: Africa’s Low Death Rates."

They muse on why Africa's death rate is so much lower than it is in more developed nations, and suggest that maybe the people of sub-Saharan Africa should focus on things like malaria and cholera, and let white people keep all the vaccines.

Spoiler, it isn't any lower, it's just that the lack of infrastructure creates under reporting of illness and death from the Corona Virus.

This was quite literally the most likely explanation, but because of the innumeracy of your average journalist when juxtaposed with the subconscious racist "othering" of things African, we have the "African Paradox":

Almost one-third of more than 1,000 bodies taken to a morgue in Lusaka in 2020 and 2021 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, implying that many more people died of COVID-19 in Zambia’s capital than official numbers suggest. Some scientists say that the findings further undermine the ‘African paradox’, a narrative that the pandemic was less severe in Africa than in other parts of the world.

This idea arose after health experts noticed that sub-Saharan nations were reporting lower case numbers and fewer COVID-19 deaths than might be expected. But researchers say that the findings from Zambia could reflect a broader truth — that a deficit of testing and strained medical infrastructure have masked COVID-19’s true toll on the continent. The findings have not yet been peer reviewed.

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