When the results of his study came in, Kondwani Jambo was stunned.
He's an immunologist
in Malawi. And last year he had set out to determine just how many
people in his country had been infected with the coronavirus since the
pandemic began.
Jambo, who works for the
Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme, knew the
total number of cases was going to be higher than the official numbers.
But his study revealed that the scale of spread was beyond anything he
had anticipated — with a huge majority of Malawians infected long before
the omicron variant emerged. "I was very shocked," he says.
Most
important, he says, the finding suggests that it has now been months
since Malawi entered something akin to what many countries still
struggling with massive omicron waves consider the holy grail: the
endemic stage of the pandemic, in which the coronavirus becomes a more
predictable seasonal bug like the flu or common cold.
In fact,
top scientists in Africa say Malawi is just one of many countries on
the continent that appear to have already reached — if not quite
endemicity — at least a substantially less threatening stage, as
evidenced by both studies of the population's prior exposure to the
coronavirus and its experience with the omicron variant.
The Malawi mystery
To understand how these
scientists have come to hold this view, it helps to first consider what
the pandemic has looked like in a country such as Malawi.
Before
the omicron wave, Malawi didn't seem to have been hit too hard by
COVID-19. Even by July of last year, when Malawi had already gone
through several waves of the coronavirus, Jambo says it appeared that
only a tiny share of Malawians had been infected.
"Probably less than 10% [of the population], if we look at the number of individuals that have tested positive," says Jambo.
The
number of people turning up in hospitals was also quite low — even
during the peak of each successive COVID-19 wave in Malawi.
Jambo
knew this likely masked what had really been going on in Malawi. The
country's population is very young — it has a median age of around 18,
he notes. This suggests most infections prior to omicron's arrival were
probably asymptomatic ones unlikely to show up in official tallies.
People wouldn't have felt sick enough to go to the hospital. And
coronavirus tests were in short supply in the country and therefore were
generally used only for people with severe symptoms or who needed tests
for travel.
So to fill in the true picture, Jambo and his collaborators turned to
another potential source of information: a repository of blood samples
that had been collected from Malawians month after month by the national
blood bank. And they checked how many of those samples had antibodies
for the coronavirus. Their finding: By the start of Malawi's third
COVID-19 wave with the delta variant last summer, as much as 80% of the
population had already been infected with some strain of the
coronavirus.
"There was absolutely no way we would have guessed that this thing had spread that much," says Jambo.
Similar
studies have been done in other African countries, including Kenya,
Madagascar and South Africa, adds Jambo. "And practically in every place
they've done this, the results are exactly the same" — very high
prevalence of infection detected well before the arrival of the omicron
variant.
Jambo thinks the findings from the blood samples in
Malawi explain a key feature of the recent omicron wave there: The
number of deaths this time has been a fraction of the already low number
during previous waves.
Less than 5% of Malawians have been
fully vaccinated. So Jambo says their apparent resistance to severe
disease was likely built up as a result of all the prior exposure to
earlier variants.
"Now we have had the beta variant — we have
had the delta variant and the original," notes Jambo. "It seems like a
combination of those three has been able to neutralize this omicron
variant in terms of severe disease."
A promising pattern
And now that the omicron
wave has peaked across Africa, country after country there seems to
have experienced the same pattern: a huge rise in infections that has
not been matched by a commensurate spike in hospitalizations and death.
Shabir Madhi is a prominent vaccinologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.
"I think we should draw comfort from the fact that this has been the least severe wave in the country," he says.
The most likely reason, he says, is that — like Malawi — South Africa gained immunity through prior infections, he says.
One
difference is that in South Africa's case, this immunity came at a high
price. South Africa's population is substantially older than Malawi's,
and during the delta wave last summer, hospitals in the country were
swamped.
Still, the upshot, says Mahdi, is that "we've come to a
point where at least three-quarters — and now after omicron, probably
80% — of South Africans have developed immunity and at least protection
against severe disease and death."
Will the protection last?
Of
course, whether Africa is truly now in a less dangerous position
depends on a "key question," says Emory University biologist Rustom Antia.
"How long does the immunity that protects us from getting ill last?"
Antia has been studying what would need to happen for the coronavirus to
become endemic.
But Mahdi says there's reason to be
optimistic on this front. Research suggests this type of protection
could last at least a year. So Mahdi says in African countries — and
likely in many other low- and middle-income countries with similar
experiences of COVID-19 — the takeaway is already clear: "I think we've
reached a turning point in this pandemic. What we need to do is learn to
live with the virus and get back to as much of a normal society as
possible."
What does that look like? For one thing, says Mahdi, "we should stop
chasing just getting an increase in the number of doses of vaccines that
are administered." Vaccination efforts should be more tightly targeted
on the vulnerable: "We need to ensure that at least 90% of people above
the age of 50 are vaccinated."
Similarly, when the next variant
comes along, Mahdi says, it will be important not to immediately panic
over the mere rise in infections. This rise will be inevitable, and any
policy that's intended to stop it with economically disruptive
restrictions, such as harsh COVID-19 lockdowns, isn't just unnecessarily
damaging — "it's fanciful thinking." Instead, officials should keep an
eye out for the far more unlikely scenario of a rise in severe illness
and death.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/01/28/1072591923/africa-may-have-reached-the-pandemics-holy-grail
6 件のコメント:
収拾できなくなった混乱は、それとなく「ただの風邪」にすり替えて、人々の意識からコロナを遠ざけていく、今までの必勝パターンである「洗脳」で誤魔化すしかないだろうな
「ただの風邪」にしては、ささいな病気でコロッと死ぬ人が増えるだろうけどw
数年後、コロナ以前の生活に戻っていいよの号令がかけられて
親族・友人・近隣の人の様子をじっくり見渡せば、様変わりに驚くだろうね
子どもたちの健康度、体力、知力も低下して、フォローする大人も減少
祝マラウィ 新新人類の発祥は再びアフリカですか?
> 新新人類の発祥は再びアフリカですか?
ハハハ
私もそうヲモタwww
ホモサピは
アフリカまで戻ってやり直しかな(苦
全部○しちゃったら支配欲を満たすための奴隷まで居なくなっちゃうから、その分はわざと残してるんでそ?
人類発祥の地アフリカからCOVID免疫獲得してやりなおし><
Re:0から始める人類ハッテンじゃないっすかwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
EUの法制化はどうなるのでしょうか
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