I bless the brains down in Africa

1 Kings 10:1

To celebrate the return of pointless Covid measures to Germany, I am going to say my final words about a whole continent where it’s over. I do not claim that the measures taken by African countries in the past have always been reasonable (the rule of law may have taken a few hits around here, but it is not even a thing in certain countries) but something must be different down there.

There are 54 countries in Africa (or so; some might count differently). These are their Covid deaths figures, per million people, ordered from smallest (3 in Burundi) to largest (2,428 in Tunisia):

Quite a spectrum, begging for explanation! Combing the woods of the internet, I gathered the following data:

• median age, from 14.8 years (Mali) to 36.8 (Seychelles)

• nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in USD per capita, from 237 (Burundi) to 13,307 (Seychelles)

• share of females in the population, from 44.4% (Equatorial Guinea) to 52.3% (Zimbabwe)

• life expectancy, from 54.4 years (Central African Republic) to 77.5 (Algeria)

• average temperature, from 12.3 degrees Celsius (Lesotho) to 30.0 (Burkina Faso)

• Covid vaccine doses dealt out per 100 people, from zero (Eritrea, maybe due to unreliable reporting) to 201 (Seychelles)

• latitude (of the capital), from -29.3 (Maseru in Lesotho) to 36.8 (Tunis in Tunisia)

• distance from equator, as absolute value of latitude, from 0.3 (Kampala in Uganda) to 36.8 (Tunis in Tunisia, of course)

• longitude (of the capital), from -23.5 (Praia in Cabo Verde) to 57.5 (Port Louis in Mauritius)

• altitude (of the capital), from 0 (quite a few capitals at the sea) to 2,363 meters (Asmara in Eritrea)

In my statistician’s fury, I then computed all the pairwise correlations:

Values below -50% or above +50% are decorated with green background. Note that correlations can be tricky. For example, by ordering the country names and comparing their ranks (from 1=Algeria to 54=Zimbabwe) with Covid deaths, we get a correlation of 22%. And if we do the same for the capitals (from 1=Abuja, Nigeria, to 54=Yaounde, Cameroon) we even get 48%. I am so happy that Berlin, and not Zwickau, is the capital of Germany. Only Aachen would be better.

That said, there seems to be a trend: the poor countries close to the equator, with low median age and low vaccination rate, have done better, and some much better, than the rest. Of course, there are many hypotheses on the table but I can’t help but get the impression that those whose careers depend on it (here, here, here, here, here, there are many more) are carefully avoiding any conclusions except maybe to do the same as before, only longer, harder, faster.

Oh, come on. The Onchocerciasis Control Programme (OCP) was running in 11 African countries from 1974 to 2002. In 1995, the African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control (APOC) extended the efforts to 20 further countries. Here are the deaths figures again, grouped by OPC or APOC membership (and Eritrea, Madagascar and Somalia might be (among) the countries with the least reliable data):

I have not dug this up in my own soil (here, here, here; pun intended). And now I will let the curtain fall on Covid in Africa.