"Over the past four weeks, there has been a downward trend in new cases in three regions: East Africa (-15 percent), West Africa (14 percent) and Southern Africa (-11 percent)," said John Nkengasong .
The director of the African Center for Disease Control and Prevention of the African Union (Africa CDC) was speaking from Addis Ababa during the weekly press conference on the evolution of the covid-19 pandemic on the continent.
"The trends seem to be continuing and the message behind these figures is that public health measures (masks, increased testing, monitoring contacts and increased hygiene measures) are working," he stressed.
On the other hand, he pointed out the increase in the number of new cases in the same period in Central Africa (+56 percent) and in North Africa (+14 percent).
John Nkengasong noted that, in the case of Central Africa, the significant increase is mainly related to the cumulative way in which cases are reported to Africa CDC.
Asked by the Lusa agency on whether it is possible to talk about a consolidated downward trend across the continent, the Africa CDC director advised caution in an "extrapolated reading" of the data and warned of the risks of "being too optimistic and neglecting public health measures. "in the fight against the new coronavirus.
"In a continent of 1.2 billion people and 55 member states, if we aggregate the data, we have a global trend of new cases falling between 10 and 12 percent in the last few weeks. But we have to be very cautious in this reading and start look at the numbers by region and even by country ", he said.
"We cannot over-value or interpret this trend because if we look at the regions, we see that there is a 14 percent increase in North Africa largely because of the new cases in Morocco, Libya and Tunisia," he added.
These three countries, together with South Africa and Ethiopia, recorded the greatest increase in new cases of covid-19 in the past week.
"We have to be very careful not to overstate some successes. We saw these trends in Europe and the United States, the numbers were going down and now we are seeing significant increases again," he said.
He therefore insisted on the need, as the continent eases restrictions and begins to travel more, to intensify the public health measures recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).
The African continent records 1,429,360 cumulative cases of covid-19, 34,836 deaths and 1,175,353 recovered patients, which represent 5.4 percent of the cases worldwide and 3.6 percent of deaths.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the continent has maintained an average rate of 2.4 percent of mortality associated with the disease and 82 percent of recovery from infections.
About 70 percent of the cases recorded on the continent are concentrated in just five countries: South Africa (47 percent), Egypt (7 percent) Morocco (5 percent), Ethiopia (5 percent) and Nigeria (4 percent) percent).
Angola (3.6 percent) remains among the 10 African countries with a mortality rate higher than the global average rate of 3.1 percent.
During the conference, the director of the CDC set the goal of increasing the number of tests to covid-19 in the continent to 20 million by the end of October and announced a first shipment of 1.4 million rapid tests to 20 countries.
"It is a realistic and ambitious goal. We have to reach that goal to get ahead of the curve," he said.
He also announced the launch, on the ground, of a large-scale study in South Africa, Gabon, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo to "assess people's perception and reaction to a possible vaccine" for covid-19 .
