It is July in the second year of the Coronavirus, and suddenly Africa feels like Europe and the United States in the first months of the pandemic. Reports of infections burning through populations—and hospitals nearly buckling under pressure—are making news headlines from Johannesburg, Lusaka, and Kinshasa sound like they are being beamed in from Lombardy, New York, and London circa April and May 2020. The intensity of transmission that African states tried to avoid through early and somewhat regular lockdowns in 2020 has finally arrived.
The irony, of course, is that this was avoidable—vaccines are available and with them COVID-19 deaths have also become avoidable. In the global North, the narrative is that the impossible has been done—vaccines for COVID-19 have been developed in under a year through massive public investment in research and development (R&D), and almost half of the populations of the United States and United Kingdom have been vaccinated.