Covid-19 update: SA identifies close to 10,000 new cases in 24 hours

South Africa has reported its highest number of daily Covid-19 cases this year, with 9,757 new cases identified in the past 24 hours.

This brings the total number of laboratory-confirmed cases to 3.818 125. This increase represents a 25.9% positivity rate, said the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), a division of the National Health Laboratory Service, on Thursday evening.

The majority of new cases today are from Gauteng Province (44%) followed by KwaZulu-Natal (24%). Western Cape accounted for 13%; Eastern Cape accounted for 6%; Free State accounted for 5%; Mpumalanga accounted for 3%; North West accounted for 2%; and Limpopo and Northern Cape each accounted for 1% respectively of today’s new cases.

The country has also recorded 64 deaths and of these, 7 occurred in the past 24 – 48 hours. This brings the total fatalities to 100,471 to date.

24.592,030 tests have been conducted in both public and private sectors.

The Covid-19 pandemic killed 13.3 to 16.6 million people in 2020 and 2021, the WHO estimated Thursday — up to triple the number of deaths attributed directly to the disease.

The World Health Organization’s long-awaited estimate of the total number of deaths caused by the pandemic — including lives lost to its knock-on effects — finally puts a number on the broader impact of the crisis.

“New estimates from the World Health Organization show that the full death toll associated directly or indirectly with the Covid-19 pandemic between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021 was approximately 14.9 million (range 13.3 million to 16.6 million),” the UN health agency said in a statement.

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The figure calculates what is termed as excess mortality due to the Covid-19 crisis, which has upended much of the planet for more than two years.

“These sobering data not only point to the impact of the pandemic but also to the need for all countries to invest in more resilient health systems that can sustain essential health services during crises, including stronger health information systems,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

Additional reporting by AFP