My surface-level, limited perception in a couple countries I have friends/family in (Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria) is that there's little to no testing, but also not apparently a hospital emergency. Then again, these same people also seem to go to their local hospital for what is understood as typhoid and malaria every year or two at least. As a born and raised North American I get told by them that's normal.
I follow news out of South Africa. COVID really is a thing there. It is a big deal there. There have been curfews. (1)
> where everyone takes ivermectin anyway,
No; they don't all take ivermectin every day at breakfast.
> You’d think the poorest parts of Africa with the worst medical systems in the world would be hit harder, but they’re not.
You would think that, yes. it's actually interesting: when the pandemic dawned in early 2020, the medical systems of US and UK were thought best prepared to deal with it (2). That clearly has not been the reality since then. (3)
Why is that? One theory is that recent experience with disease control matters. UK and US were complacent about controlling a virulent pandemic. Whereas asian counties with good economies and recent experience with SARS did very well at doing it again. (4)
African countries did .. not as bad as you might assume, given "the worst medical systems in the world", maybe because of a population the skews younger than the west, and maybe because of experience with various diseases from HIV+TB (In South Africa and other countries) to Ebola (in Central Africa)
1) https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-africas-president...
2) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/countries-preparednes...
3) https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/all-bets-are-measu...
4) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/027507402094370...
False premise. Africa as a whole trended a lot like Europe and North America until late 2020, but the late 2020 to 2021 reopening explosion that the latter two places had was replaced with a slower gradual growth with a later and lower peak in Africa, which has been fairly hard hit compared to the rest of the world outside Europe and North America.
I'm not sure that I buy that; cities in Africa have large dense slums, where it's going to be hard to distance. And crowded transport to/from work.
https://www.kulturevulturez.com/story-south-africa-slums-gan...
You’d think the poorest parts of Africa with the worst medical systems in the world would be hit harder, but they’re not. And it’s probably not genetic since the African diaspora is hit hard by covid.