According to the African Union Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the total number of cases on the continent is 5,288,507 and the number of recovered cases is 4,671,415, up 27,613 in the last 24 hours.
Southern Africa remains the most affected region of the continent, with 2,363,517 cases and 68,952 deaths associated with covid-19. This region is home to the country worst hit by the pandemic, South Africa, which has 1,861,065 cases and 59,258 deaths, more than the entire second worst affected African region. South Africa accounts for 35 percent of all cases of infection in the entire continent.
North Africa, which succeeds Southern Africa in the covid-19 figures, reached 1,547,792 infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and 47,044 deaths associated with the disease on Thursday.
East Africa counts 705,996 infections and 13,917 deaths, and the West Africa region records 482,430 cases of infection and 6394 deaths. Central Africa has the fewest cases of infection and deaths, 188,772 and 2971 respectively.
Egypt, the second African country with the most deaths after South Africa, records 15,967 deaths and 278,761 infected, followed by Tunisia, with 14,318 deaths and 391,411 cases, and Morocco, which has the second highest number of infections in the entire continent, 527,696 cases (10 percent of all infections), but fewer deaths than the previous two countries, 9254 deaths associated with the disease.
Also among the most affected countries are Ethiopia, with 4292 fatalities and 275,502 infections, and Algeria, with 3791 deaths and 137,049 infected.
Regarding the Portuguese-speaking countries, Angola accounts for 878 deaths associated with the disease and 38,002 infected accumulated since the beginning of the pandemic, followed by Mozambique (857 deaths and 73,211 cases), Cape Verde (284 deaths and 32,192 infections), Equatorial Guinea (120 deaths and 8712 cases), Guinea-Bissau (69 deaths and 3839 infected) and Sao Tome and Principe (37 deaths and 2360 infections).
The first case of covid-19 in Africa appeared in Egypt on February 14, 2020, and Nigeria was the first sub-Saharan African country to record cases of infection on February 28.
The covid-19 pandemic has claimed at least 3,893,974 victims worldwide, resulting from more than 179.5 million officially diagnosed cases of infection, according to the French AFP agency.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
