According to the African Union Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the total number of cases on the continent is 7,816,222 and the number of recovered cases is 6,983,155, up 41,340 in the last 24 hours.
Southern Africa remains the most affected region of the continent, with 3,713,887 cases and 102,979 deaths associated with covid-19. This region is home to the worst-hit country in the pandemic, South Africa, which has 2,787,203 cases and 82,496 deaths.
North Africa, which succeeds Southern Africa in the covid-19 figures, reached 2,364,444 infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and 63,378 deaths associated with the disease on Thursday.
East Africa counts 911,837 infections and 18,878 deaths, and the West Africa region records 606,067 cases of infection and 8703 deaths. Central Africa has the fewest cases of infection and deaths, 219,987 and 3212 respectively.
Tunisia, the second African country with the most deaths after South Africa, records 23,538 deaths and 666,168 infected, followed by Egypt, with 16,743 deaths and 288,732 cases, and Morocco, which has the second highest number of infections in the entire continent, 866,968 cases, but fewer deaths than the previous two countries, 12,607 deaths associated with the disease.
Among the most affected countries are also Algeria, with 5302 deaths and 196,527 people infected, Kenya, with 4739 deaths associated with the disease and 236,881 infections, and Ethiopia, with 4692 deaths and 309,351 infections.
Regarding the Portuguese-speaking countries, Mozambique accounts for 1866 deaths associated with the disease and 146,754 infected accumulated since the beginning of the pandemic, followed by Angola (1227 deaths and 47,781 cases), Cape Verde (314 deaths and 35,506 infections), Equatorial Guinea (126 deaths and 9477 cases), Guinea-Bissau (120 deaths and 5829 infected) and Sao Tome and Principe (37 deaths and 2627 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.
Covid-19 has caused at least 4,518,163 deaths worldwide, among more than 217.63 million infections by the new coronavirus recorded since the start of the pandemic, according to the most recent assessment by the Agence France-Presse.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
