Leveraging Serosurveillance and Postmortem Surveillance to Quantify the Impact of COVID-19 in Africa.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on global health, the magnitude of which appears to differ intercontinentally: for example, reports suggest 271,900 per million people have been infected in Europe versus 8,800 per million people in Africa. While Africa is the second largest continent by population, its reported COVID-19 cases comprise <3% of global cases. Although social, environmental, and environmental explanations have been proposed to clarify this discrepancy, systematic infection underascertainment may be equally responsible.

Methods

We seek to quantify magnitudes of underascertainment in COVID-19's cumulative incidence in Africa. Using serosurveillance and postmortem surveillance, we constructed multiplicative factors estimating ratios of t

SUBMITTER: Kogan NE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9619616 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature