Since the first case on the continent was confirmed on 14 February 2020 in Egypt, the 55 member countries of the African Union (AU) have registered 4,005,204 infections, which corresponds to 3.4 percent of the world total, according to Africa CDC data until 9 am local time.
The African continent has recorded 107,001 deaths from the new coronavirus (4 percent of the world total) since the beginning of the pandemic, with 3,589,067 patients having been discharged, according to the agency.
Five countries are responsible for 66 percent of infections: South Africa (38 percent), which remains the epicenter of the pandemic on the African continent, Morocco (12 percent), Tunisia (6 percent), Egypt (5 percent percent) and Ethiopia (4 percent).
As of 1 March, just over 37 million tests had been carried out on the African continent, a very low number for a continental population of around 1.3 billion.
The region is currently trying to boost inoculation campaigns against the virus.
Vaccines against covid-19 distributed through the Covax platform have reached 22 African countries since the first doses were received in Ghana on 24 February, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported on Thursday.
"Every new delivery of vaccines in Africa is another step towards equity," said the director of the WHO regional office for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, during the weekly press conference on the covid-19 pandemic.
According to WHO, these 22 African countries received about 14.8 million doses through Covax, of which 518,000 have already been administered.
The last African nations to join the list of beneficiaries were Benin, where 144,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine arrived on Wednesday - out of a total of 792,000 to be sent to the country in the coming months - and Sierra Leone, which received 96,000 doses of AstraZeneca on Tuesday, as part of an initial batch of 528,000.
The other African countries where vaccines against the new coronavirus have already landed are Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Gambia, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali, Liberia, Togo, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sudan, Democratic Republic Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Malawi, Botswana and Lesotho.
The Covax platform - driven by WHO and the Alliance for Vaccines (Gavi) - seeks to ensure global and equitable access to antiviral drugs and aims to provide at least 2 billion doses by the end of the year.
In parallel to these efforts, another group of African nations is already vaccinating thanks to the solutions they have managed to find through bilateral agreements with pharmaceutical producers.
This is the case, for example, in Morocco, Seychelles, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Egypt and Sierra Leone.
Despite this progress, Africa and its 1.3 billion people remain globally lagging behind in terms of immunization progress: of the 55 member states of the African Union, only 19 have started national immunization campaigns.
The covid-19 pandemic caused at least 2,621,295 deaths worldwide, resulting from more than 117.9 million cases of infection, according to a report made by the news agency France-Presse (AFP).
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
