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PingER was originally set up for monitoring connections between High Energy Physics (HEP) sites that were mainly at National Labs and Universities in the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan. As a result, most hosts being monitored were and still are involved in Research and Education and have high-performance network links form organizations such as: Canarie, ESnet, Internet2, GEANT, DFN etc. Such network connections have sufficient capacity to accomodate changes in traffic patterns. These networks are deliberately well provisioned to enable research and explore the future etc. Another reason pointed out to me by Wade Hong of Carleton University is "Due to the students in residence being asked to vacate for social distancing. With many university LMSes (Learning Management Systems) now cloud-based, and the use of cloud media services for streaming of recorded content, the potential bottlenecks have moved from the institution to these services."
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On the other hand, almost all hosts monitored in Africa (apart from 3 in the Republic of South Africa), and South America (apart from some in Brazil and Argentina) are on public networks that are probably engineered to meet the expected be good enough for the typical traffic, and thus more likely to be impacted by unexpected changes in traffic patterns caused by Covid-19 interventions.
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