The New York Times — of all places — ran a surprising article last week headlined, “Trying to Solve a Covid Mystery: Africa’s Low Death Rates.” It’s a mystery! The sub-headline reads, “The coronavirus was expected to devastate the continent, but higher-income and better-prepared countries appear to have fared far worse.”

All I can say, is paging “Experts, experts to the front desk please”

The Times reported population studies showed that about two-thirds of the population in most sub-Saharan countries already have Covid antibodies. Since only 14 percent of the population has received any kind of Covid vaccination, logic would dictate that the antibodies must be overwhelmingly from natural infection.

The bottom line is, that the “experts” seem to be clueless as to why low-injected Africa is doing so much better than 1st world countries with well-developed government or private hospital systems and high injection rates. No ideas at all. They’re simply baffled. The article explored and rejected a series of possibilities, like whether an inordinately large number of deaths had somehow gone unreported in Africa. But, according to an expert cited for the story, “it was clear there had been no tide of desperately sick people.”

What would lead this expert to this conclusion, simple, because of previous scares like Ebola, Africa has one of the most highly developed infection tracking systems in the world. It’s not like they aren’t keeping track.

The story concludes that Africans should STILL get the injections, of course. The reason, well “Because at this point, it’s not for those people: It’s to try to prevent new variants,” an expert explained. “A new variant as infectious as Omicron but more lethal than Delta could yet emerge, he warned, leaving Africans vulnerable unless vaccination rates increased significantly.”

Now I’m not an expert unlike Bill Gates whose boney fingerprints are all over Africa, but given how well they’ve faired with the original strain of the virus plus all the variants, shouldn’t we be doing what they’re doing rather than the other way around? After all, wouldn’t it make sense to copy the training methods of the gold medalist rather than those of the one finished last?

Experts?