[To what extent Africa can limit the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic?].

Following the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the alerts issued by the World Health Organization, for several months attention has been focused on Africa as a potentially severely endangered continent. A sizable number of African countries, mainly low and middle income, suffer from limited available resources, especially in critical care, and COVID-19 is liable to overwhelm their already fragile health systems. To effectively manage what is shaping up as a multidimensional crisis, the challenge unquestionably goes beyond the necessary upgrading of public health infrastructures. It is also a matter of anticipating and taking timely action with regard to factors that may mitigate the propagation of SARS-CoV2 and thereby cushion the shock of the pandemic on the African continent. While some of these factors are largely unmanageable (climate, geography…), several others (socio-cultural, religious, audio-visual, and potentially political…) could be more or less effectively dealt with by African governments and populations.