More than two-thirds of Africans may have contracted COVID-19 over the past two years, around 97 times more than reported infections, a World Health Organization (WHO) report suggested on Thursday. Laboratory tests have detected 11.5 million COVID cases and 252,000 fatalities across the African continent. But the WHO Africa region said its study - which is still being peer-reviewed - suggests the officially confirmed numbers were ‘likely only scratching the surface of the real extent of coronavirus infections in Africa’. ‘A new meta-analysis of standardised seroprevalence study revealed that the true number of infections could be as much as 97 times higher than the number of confirmed reported cases,’ said WHO Africa boss Matshidiso Moeti. ‘This suggests that more than two-thirds of all Africans have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus,’ she added. The report analysed more than 150 studies published between January 2020 and December last year. It showed exposure to the virus jumped from just 3% in June 2020 to 65% by September last year. ‘In real terms, this means that in September 2021, rather than the reported 8.2 million cases, there were 800 million,’ said Moeti.