These are still early days for coronavirus in Nigeria, whose first case was reported on February 25. As of the morning of March 24, Nigeria had forty-two confirmed cases and one confirmed death, according to COVID-19 tracking by Johns Hopkins University. But an outbreak of Lassa fever, caused by a more common virus, has been active in Nigeria for the past few months.

As the military dislodged Boko Haram in 2015 from the territory it had captured and occupied earlier, victims of suicide bombers grew as a proportion of those the group killed through August 2018. Between June 2014, when Boko Haram reportedly deployed its first female suicide bomber, and February 2018, about 468 women and girls have been deployed or arrested in 240 suicide attacks, killing roughly 1,200 and injuring some 3,000.

This update represents violence in Nigeria and related to Boko Haram in Cameroon, Chad, and Niger from March 14 to 20, 2020.

On July 18, "bandits" shot down a Nigerian Air Force (NAF) fighter jet in northern Nigeria on the border between Zamfara and Katsina states. The pilot successfully ejected from the aircraft and avoided capture by the "bandits" using his "survival skills" until he reached an army installation. While NAF planes have crashed in the past—including earlier this year when a plane crash killed Chief of Army Staff General Ibrahim Attahiru—this is apparently the first time a jet has been brought down by enemy fire.

The Associated Press reported on Monday that thirty of fifty-four countries in Africa have reported the presence of COVID-19, and the list is likely incomplete. The virus had been slower to appear in Africa than in most other regions of the world. As elsewhere, the coronavirus was usually introduced by travelers from other continents, notably Europe. All of South Africa’s sixty-two cases, as of Monday, were from abroad, according to the health ministry.