According to official figures, the number of corona infections in Africa is about twice as high as in Germany.
However, the WHO fears a high number of unreported cases.
Brazzaville - 8.4 million coronavirus infections: this is the official number since the pandemic began in Africa.
For comparison: According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), more than 4.3 million corona cases have been reported in Germany alone.
However, the World Health Organization (WHO) suspects an extremely high number of unreported cases on the continent.
WHO fears a huge number of unreported cases: Almost 86 percent of all corona infections in Africa go unnoticed
Almost 86 percent of all corona infections in Africa therefore go unnoticed.
This means that the number of all infections on the continent is estimated by the WHO at a total of 59 million - that is seven times more than the number of actually reported cases.
The WHO explains the high number of unreported cases, among other things, with the fact that the number of corona tests has so far been limited.
Healthcare facilities have so far mainly focused on testing people with symptoms of the disease.
This has led to extensive underreporting, according to the WHO.
Corona unreported number in Africa: "Still flying blind"
"With limited testing, we are still flying blind in far too many communities in Africa," said Matshidiso Moeti.
“What we see could only be the tip of the iceberg,” feared the WHO Regional Director for Africa.
According to the WHO, only 70 million corona tests have so far been reported on the continent with a total of 1.3 billion inhabitants.
By comparison, the United States performed more than 550 million tests with about a third of the population, while the United Kingdom performed over 280 million tests with less than 10 percent of Africa's population.
In total, more than 8.4 million corona cases have been registered in Africa, including 214,000 deaths.
Less than half of the African countries that have received corona vaccines have fully vaccinated around two percent of their population on average, according to WHO.
For comparison: in Germany at least 65.5 percent of the total population now have complete vaccination protection - rather even more, as the RKI recently announced.
(ph / dpa)
