[nffc]

Well, there is a possible school of thought (which may turn out to be bunkum) that previous exposure and immunity to other coronaviruses helps with this one.


I think the case load in Africa is probably due to other factors though. Given the lifestyle in a lot of the countries, due to previous or current poverty etc, they presumably have a much younger population than the likes of the EU, UK, US etc, and fewer older people with underlying health conditions (likely because they have unfortunately already succumbed to them) so if you're looking at say the top risk groups for vaccinations/people getting boosters now, they will probably have fewer of those to start off with. Also, given that covid has a variety of symptoms and in its severe case is basically a viral pneumonia, indeed if people who get it have any symptoms at all, it's likely a lot of infections which were contracted were either not detected due to the symptoms being either minimal or non-existent, and/or due to lack of testing, in all possibility they also wouldn't either have locked down or been able to do so as effectively (which was indeed an argument cited for India). The access to testing you'd imagine would be much less than in other countries too and it took us a while to get mass testing available quickly. So a lot of people there had probably already had it - which is a figure we don't know for anywhere, given that the "first wave" peak of cases was probably as high as the "second wave" but not picked up due to lack of mass testing, when you look at the hospitalisations and deaths the figures are similar there.