By the weekend, Kenya will have collected one million swabs analysed since the start of the pandemic. This is a fairly ridiculous number when compared to the numbers in Western countries, even considering those with more or less similar populations.
In Italy, just to give an example close to us, to date 25 million swabs have been taken and the cases are close to 2 million. In Kenya the cases will soon reach 100,000.
In fact the proportions are similar, if not higher, since the ratio of tests is 1 to 25 and that of cases is 1 to 20.
What differentiates Kenya, like other African countries, from Europe or the US is the number of deaths, which in Italy are almost 68,000 and in Kenya around 1630. Here the proportion is decidedly different, more than 1 to 40.
Many experts on viruses and Africa have expressed their views on the reasons for these different results: the average age of the Kenyan population certainly counts compared to that of Western countries.
It is well known that on average people in the 'first world' live at least twice as long as in the Dark Continent. It is also known that the virus particularly affects the elderly.
According to other eminent virologists, heat is another important factor (but not all of sub-Saharan Africa is hot in the same way) and research will try to explain that the DNA of the indigenous populations also has something different from that of the mzungu 'relatives' and in these cases the difference comes out (to the advantage of the Africans).
In this bailamme of data, projections, percentages and indications, the official figures seem to make less and less sense and we take comfort in the falling percentages.
The important thing is not to lose touch with real life here in Kenya: monitoring the mortuaries, the number of funerals held in rural areas, the diseases treated in the small dispensaries in the province and the citizens who, though less and less, prefer to follow the directives of the Government.
Yesterday, for the record, Kenya recorded 552 positive cases of Covid-19 in the last 24 hours, bringing the country's total to 93. There were 7,013 swabs analysed, bringing the total number of samples analysed so far to 991,448.
Of the 552 positive cases, 49 patients were hospitalised in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), 21 of whom were put on ventilatory support, 21 on supplementary oxygen and another 6 on observation. At the same time, 596 patients recovered from their illness with 484 discharged from home care and 112 from hospital. The total number of recoveries rose to 74,999.
Four patients succumbed to the disease, bringing the total number of deaths to 1,618.