Why is COVID 19 not so harsh in African countries?

The biggest reason is that there’s not as much international travel in Africa, as there is in e.g. Europe.

I mean, just look at this FlightRadar flight tracking map right now, you can almost count the number of planes that are flying over Africa. Take a moment to look at the US map on the left, any wonder why it’s the hardest hit right now? People are flying all over the place, spreading the virus in the process.

On the European continent, you can cross 13 countries in less than 4 hours of flight, but in Africa, you can fly for 2 hours and still be in the same country.

In my home country, somewhere in Africa, we had zero coronavirus cases, until one journalist returned from the USA, and refused to be quarantined on arrival, used his political connections to get out of quarantine, and went home. He held several meetings with different people, went partying, went to the gym, met students at a university, and then started developing symptoms. He was the first recorded Covid-19 death. Since then, the country has had at least 17 confirmed cases, all linked to people who had flown into the country from Europe, Asia and the US.

We just don’t have as many inbound flights to bring Covid-19, as Asian, European and American countries do. It’s one blessing in disguise I guess, but it does make air travel expensive.

I have always lamented the huge cost of air travel in Africa, and the absence of strong domestic demand for flights, then when I flew for the first time from Johannesburg to Dubai, I came to appreciate just how large the continent is in relation to Europe. I also saw how Europeans travel so frequently among their countries, to the extent of even commuting by air (something unheard of in the part of the world I come from - flying is a luxury!), then I appreciated how European countries are strongly integrated economically, with all that free movement of people, and few travel restrictions, and how small the countries were in relation to African countries. So when the coronavirus hit, it spread very quickly because Europeans and Americans travel a lot by air, unlike Africans. We tend to fly only when it’s absolutely necessary.