NPR

Africa may have reached the pandemic's holy grail

New findings from Malawi suggest the country has entered something akin to the endemic stage of the pandemic — along with many other African nations.
A student washes her hands before entering a classroom at a school in Blantyre, Malawi, in March 2021. Top scientists say that many African countries, including Malawi, appear to have already arrived at a substantially less threatening stage of the coronavirus pandemic.

When the results of his study came in, Kondwani Jambo was stunned.

He's an immunologist in Malawi. And last year he had set out to determine just how many people in his country had been infected with the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

Jambo, who works for the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme, knew the total number of cases was going to be higher than the official numbers. But his study revealed that the scale of spread was beyond anything he had anticipated — with a huge majority of Malawians infected long before the omicron variant emerged. "I was very shocked," he says.

Most important, he says, the finding suggests that it

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