A review of the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on malaria control in Africa

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected many scientific and technical institutions globally, resulting in lower productivity in a number of fields and programs. As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads rapidly around the globe, there is an urgent need to aggressively tackle the novel coronavirus while ensuring that other killer diseases, such as malaria, are not neglected. Although many malaria-endemic African nations have shown remarkable resilience and adaptivity in the face of previous global health threats, they nevertheless face the unprecedented challenge of COVID-19 with a comparatively lower health-care system capacity and a higher baseline level of malaria burden. Recognition of the threat posed to malaria control by COVID-19 has been widespread, and there is an urgent need to properly contextualize these threats amid rapidly evolving global health priorities. Doing so will require granular information with which to compare the relative threats posed by the spatially varying deterioration of malaria interventions. In this article, we discuss the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on malaria control in Africa. In this review, different literatures were consulted from Web of Science, Pubmed, AJOL etc., using Google search engine, and findings from these studies were put together in an attempt to provide evidence for a diverse impact of the COVID 19 pandemic on malaria. There is the need to further investigate the public health consequences of COVID 19 pandemic on malaria burden.