COVID-19 pandemic in the African continent: forecasts of cumulative cases, new infections, and mortality

Yohannes Kinfu; Uzma Alam; Tom Achoki

To remove the effect of size, we also estimated prevalence rates shown in Panel B of Table 1 by combining the forecasts on cumulative cases with population estimates which we generated for each month from the UN annual population estimates. This suggests that population level prevalence of COVID-19 in Africa is expected to remain under 1.5 percent (CI 95% 0.03 to 7.6) throughout the prediction period, but there are wide inter-regional differences. In the Northern and Southern Africa sub-regions, cumulative infection rates are expected to be slightly over 3 percent, with the rate in the respective subregions expected to be around 3.5 percent (CI 95% 0.09 to 22.1) as of June 30. This means that even under a very high infection scenario, as observed in the 95% upper confidence interval for the two sub-regions, infection rates are unlikely to reach more than a quarter of the continent's population.