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This article was written by a small group of clinical and non-clinical health care workers and researchers from Zimbabwe who have been involved in the pandemic in various ways in our country.
They noticed how different the trajectory of the pandemic was in their country compared to predictions and even sophisticated modelling studies. They thought that a description of what actually happened was necessary and timely.
They narrate the sequence of events as well as corrective measures put in place by the government. It adds to the interesting discourse that is currently underway about the divergence between predicted scenarios and the eventual reality, the reasons why predictions were so pessimistic and why Africa in general and Zimbabwe, in particular, appears to have bucked the trend.
It may inform how we think about the risks of infectious disease pandemics in the future and also what our responses to them should be. Time will tell whether the indirect consequences of the pandemic and our response to it had a more profound effect than the virus itself.