Minister Phaahla receives Covid-19 Vaccine at George Mukhari Hospital. (Photo by Gallo Images/Lefty Shivambu)
South Africa currently has 13,699 active cases of Covid-19, with 1,679 new cases identified in the past 24 hours.
This brings the total number of laboratory-confirmed cases to 3.717,067. This increase represents a 6.4% positivity rate, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), a division of the National Health Laboratory Service, has announced.
The majority of new cases today are from Gauteng (41%), followed by Western Cape (22%). Kwa-Zulu Natal accounted for 21%; Eastern Cape accounted for 5%; Free State, Mpumalanga and North West each accounted for 3% respectively; Limpopo accounted for 2%; and Northern Cape accounted for 1% of today’s new cases.
“Due to the ongoing audit exercise by the National Department of Health (NDoH), there may be a backlog of Covid-19 mortality cases reported. Today, the NDoH reports 44 deaths and of these, 6 occurred in the past 24 – 48 hours,” said the NICD.
This brings the total fatalities to 100,020 to date.
23,809,344 tests have been conducted in both public and private sectors.
There has been an increase of 41 hospital admissions in the past 24 hours.
The World Health Organization on Wednesday laid out three possible paths that the Covid-19 pandemic might follow in 2022 — with a new, more virulent variant the worst-case scenario.
The WHO said the most likely way forward was that the severity of disease caused by the virus would wane over time, due to greater public immunity.
But the UN health agency also said a more dangerous variant of concern than Omicron could be lurking round the corner.
The WHO released its updated Covid-19 Strategic Preparedness, Readiness and Response Plan, with the organisation’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hoping it will be the last.
It lays out three possible scenarios for how the third year of the pandemic will pan out.
“Based on what we know now, the most likely scenario is that the virus continues to evolve, but the severity of disease it causes reduces over time as immunity increases due to vaccination and infection,” Tedros told a press conference.
He said periodic spikes in Covid-19 cases and deaths might occur as immunity wanes, which may require occasional booster vaccinations for vulnerable people.
“In the best-case scenario, we may see less severe variants emerge, and boosters or new formulations of vaccines won’t be necessary,” he said.
“In the worst-case scenario, a more virulent and highly transmissible variant emerges. Against this new threat, people’s protection against severe disease and death, either from prior vaccination or infection, will wane rapidly.”
Tedros said that scenario would require significantly altering the currently-available vaccines, and then making sure they get delivered to the people most vulnerable to severe disease.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, said the virus still has “a lot of energy left”, going into the third year of the pandemic.
Last week, more than 10 million new cases and 45,000 deaths were reported to the WHO, which said the number of new infections would be far higher as testing rates have dropped.
At the end of last week, more than 479 million confirmed cases had been registered throughout the pandemic, and more than six million deaths, although WHO acknowledges that the true toll could be several times higher.
Additional reporting by AFP
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