Strategic Response to COVID-19 in the WHO African Region: 1 February 2021 to 31 January 2022
The year 2021, the second of Africa’s battle against COVID-19, proved difficult. Challenges were heightened by the increasingly severe third and fourth waves of the pandemic, and global COVID-19 vaccine inequity. For WHO African Region countries, these challenges were compounded by a range of other humanitarian crises, with 38 of the 47 countries experiencing some level of food shortage; reasons varied from extreme weather events to political crises or conflicts, further hindering the pandemic response.
On a more positive note, since the first reported COVID-19 case in Africa on 14 February 2020, several countries on the continent have assumed a leading role in the response. For example, on 4 March that year, Nigeria became the first African country to sequence the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Accordingly, in late 2021, Botswana and South Africa identified Omicron, to date the most transmissible strain of the COVID-19 variants.