By Emmanuel Oluebube, Correspondent UK
Recall the Africa COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index (CCVI), developed by Surgo Foundation, modeled after Surgo’s US COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index, featured as a resource by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is acclaimed to be the first Pan-African index to assess vulnerability to COVID-19 not only across, but within countries?
It is a new index designed to fill a critical information gap and help African governments, health officials, non-governmental organizations, and others respond to the coronavirus pandemic that finds that although Africa has not yet been overwhelmed by COVID-19, several regions are showing troubling signs of vulnerability to the social, economic, and health impacts of an outbreak that should not be ignored.
The startling discovery, however, is that some African countries and territories with historical attachment to Europe are left out of the research for lack of data. Data Sources for the CCVI list Demographic and Health (DHS) Surveys, Institutes of Health Metric and Evaluation (IHME), Malaria Atlas Project, Uppsala Conflict Data Programme, UNHCR, World Bank, Open data for Africa, Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), Global Roads Inventory Project, World Pop, and Global Data Lab. Mobility data are from Google. Fatality and hospitalization rates are from Salje et al. (2020) in Science and kindly provided by Dr Mumtaz and Prof. Raddad.
Countries excluded due to lack of data include: Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritius, Mayotte (France), Réunion (France), São Tomé and Príncipe, Seychelles, and Western Sahara.
“By showing us the different ways African regions can be vulnerable to COVID-19 beyond just mortality, this index gives us predictive power we’ve never had before,” said executive director of Surgo Foundation, Dr. Sema Sgaier “While it does not predict which regions are at risk of having outbreaks, it does predict whether a region in Africa is able to mitigate the health, economic, and social impacts of COVID-19 and what downstream consequences each region should plan for.”
The Africa CCVI ranks 751 regions across 48 African countries in terms of vulnerability to COVID-19 based on seven key themes: socioeconomic status, population density, access to transportation and housing, epidemiological factors, health system factors, fragility, and age of population. It is the only index to measure vulnerability to COVID-19 across the African continent at a subnational level.
“The Africa COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index fills an information gap that has challenged the global development community for too long,” said Senior Innovation Adviser at DFID, Magdalena Banasiak who manages the COVIDAction programme, which co-funded the index. “Until now, limited COVID-19 data in Africa has not provided a true reflection of where this pandemic could have the greatest impact–partly due to low scale-up of testing, and partly due to incomplete reporting. Now we can better understand and prioritise pandemic response efforts not just across, but within African countries.”
