Should Africa be concerned about Covid-19 variants?

South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa has said Africa needs the skills and capacity to manufacture its own Covid-19. vaccines. At a conference of African leaders, he said the world was watching “vaccine apartheid”.

And it’s a fact that of the hundreds of millions of vaccines that have so far been given, less than two percent have been to Africans.

Up until now Africa has had a low number of Covid-19 infections compared to Europe or the United States. This is because many African governments reacted quickly - they closed borders and imposed restrictions. But the World Health Organisation has warned another wave of Covid-19 infections could happen and that less developed heath care systems could find themselves struggling. So how concerned should we be by these new variants? Prof Salim Abdul Karim is the co-chair of the South African Covid-19 advisory committee. He said, “because we are still seeing transmission, we are seeing new variants”. He said when they discovered the new South African variant “they were very concerned” because this new variant “was able to cause infections in individuals who had already been infected” in the first wave. So, with Covid-19 variants spreading how worried should Africa be about them?