Johannesburg Prison inmates gets their vaccine after the Minister of Justice and Correctional Services, Ronald Lamola visit at Johannesburg prison, 20 July 2021, to launch the Correctional Services Vaccination Rollout Programme. Correctional service officials were vaccinated under the second phase of the vaccination roll-out program, as they form part of the essential workers. Picture: Nigel Sibanda
The National Institute for Communictble Diseases (NICD) reported that by Thursday, South Africa recorded 14,858 new Covid-19 cases.
This now brings the total number of laboratory-confirmed cases to 2,342,330.
It said this increase represents a 26.5% positivity rate, adding that a sum of 433 Covid-19 related deaths have been reported, which brings the total number of fatalities to 68,625 to date.
14,425,215 tests have been conducted in both public and private sectors.
Meanwhile, the country’s vaccination drive continues.
The South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra) has since revealed it is investigating the cause of deaths of people who died after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine.
Briefing Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Health relating to the government’s vaccination rollout and the approval process of vaccines on Wednesday, Saphra CEO Dr Boitumelo Semete-Makokotlela said the regulator was monitoring “adverse events following immunisation” after reports of side effects.
Semete-Makokotlela said Saphra was probing the findings reported from administering the double-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines and the single-dose Johnson & Johnson (J&J) jab across the country.
28 people have died after getting a vaccine shot so far, which Sahpra is also looking into.
“There are also those who have been reported for adverse events of special interest. I have had some fatalities and those causality studies that are currently ongoing.
“And what a causality study is to say, we need to determine if the event that we saw is indeed related to the vaccine, or related to something else.
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“These are very comprehensive studies that are being conducted so autopsies will be done… the history of the individual in terms of what other medication they were taking.
“It’s quite an extensive process that is then being conducted, but while the process is being done we do note these fatalities and we will then monitor.
“What we can say is that these fatalities do not, at this point, outnumber what you would see generally in the public.
“But be that as it may, we are doing causality assessments,” she said.
Additional reporting by Molefe Seeletsa
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