African Death Toll From COVID-19 Increasing

NAIROBI - The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the continent's death toll from COVID-19 has jumped 17 percent in the past month. In a media briefing Thursday, the Africa CDC said the infection rate has also increased and warned some countries are testing less often for the virus than needed.

In his weekly online press briefing from Ethiopia, the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengosong, gave a grim picture of the continent’s COVID-19 situation during the month of July. "There has been an average increase of four percent of new cases over that time period … in terms of new deaths in the last four weeks, we’ve recorded an average of 17 percent new deaths [in the continent’s most populous countries] over same period … in terms of testing as a continent, as of today we have conducted about 58 million COVID tests and last week alone the continent conducted about 1.3 million tests but that represents a decrease of 19 percent over the previous week," Nkengosong said. "Overall positivity rate stands at 11.2 percent.”