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According to the mainstream media, the nations of Africa and South America are now seeing COVID-19 cases “spike.”
But, in fact, considering the living conditions in these nations and the list of widespread chronic diseases, plus serious illnesses and starvation, the numbers add up to next to nothing relative to total population.
As for COVID-19, yes, the countries are especially vulnerable. In many, the poor crowd into slums; draw polluted water from communal taps; use filthy, disease-ridden public toilets; and have underlying health conditions ranging from malnutrition to diabetes, lower respiratory tract infections, tuberculosis, diarrhoeal disease, malaria – to HIV.
Public health infrastructures in many of these countries are feeble or even nonexistent.
South African president Cyril Ramaphosa called for “extraordinary action” to “prevent a human catastrophe of enormous proportions.” On 23 March, he declared a 21-day national lockdown.
TRENDPOST: As we have noted in previous issues of the Trends Journal, South Africa is in recession and falling fast. There have been escalating anti-government demonstrations and social unrest raging across the nation prior to the coronavirus outbreak.
While the mainstream media reports on South Africa’s lockdown, and portrays it as measures taken for the betterment of the people, absent is the fact that when the lockdown was called no one in the nation had died of the disease, and, as we go to press, out of a population of 59 million, a grand total of three people have died from coronavirus.
From Chile to India, from Iraq to Hong Kong, governments that had been fighting protests, demonstrations, riots and wars, as documented in the Trends Journal over the past year, are now using COVID-19 to prohibit protests and enforce totalitarian rule.
 While the virus is spreading through Africa, unlike Italy and other nations with elderly populations, the average age in the continent is only 20, thus giving more people a better chance of surviving without severe illness.
It should be noted that Africa, with a population of 1.2 billion people, to date, has had 174 coronavirus deaths. And South America, with a population of 422.5 billion people, has had 309 coronavirus deaths.