”Africa” is not a thing. I mean, it's the name of a continent but it comprises countries with very different realities. There are middle incoe countries like South Africa and Botswana, and also many poor and very poor countries. The strategies adopted by these countries are different, and rightly so.
South Africa (a classic example of a middle income country) we have seen. Like so many middle income countries, they were very hard hit by the pandemic, in spite of many attempts at severe lockdowns. They sure as heck did not keep the virus out.
Many African countries did close their immigration procedures, but you can't actually close borders in the poor countries of Africa because their borders are porous. I mean, have you ever been to the Sahel? Much of the borders basically consists of invisible lines in woodlands or standing stones in the desert! You can't stop people moving in and out.
Genuinely amused by the very idea that someone could think that the reason we haven't heard much from the poorer African countries is clearly because they adopted zero covid policies and kept the virus out through border controls.
We haven't heard much from the poorer African countries because they have an average population age of about 20 and most people are simply not getting sick enough to create much attention. There are only small numbers of elderly people in these countries (and medically frail people mostly die of something else, before covid has the chance to get them); also, at the risk of sounding a bit horrible, the reality is that in somewhere like South Sudan, a "70-80-something person dying of a bad chest one year" (the kind of metric that rich countries think of as something to avoid) tends to be considered part and parcel of life.
As a result, the virus has largely washed through these countries, even in advance of vaccination.
www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/01/28/1072591923/africa-may-have-reached-the-pandemics-holy-grail
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.