Nurse Ruth Seikaneng (64) sits for a portrait at the Reivilo Health Centre in Reivilo, a town an hour away from Taung, North West Province, South Africa, on September 4, 2020. Seikaneng is one of two nurses on shift at any given time servicing the town of 4,000 people. When her colleague died from COVID-19 she had to work even longer hours to support the town. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Gulshan Khan
As of Monday, 01 February 2021, the cumulative number of detected Covid-19 cases is 1,456,309 with 2,548 new cases identified, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize has confirmed.
235 more Covid-19 related deaths were reported, with 59 from Eastern Cape, 16 from Free State, 51 from Gauteng, 10 from Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN), 33 from North West, 2 from Northern Cape and 64 from Western Cape.
This brings the total number of Covid-19 related deaths to 44 399.
Recoveries now stand at 1,306,022 representing a recovery rate of 89%.
Meanwhile, a total of 8,300,749 tests have been completed with 21,549 new tests conducted since the last report.
During his nation address on Monday, 1 February, President Cyril Ramaphosa noted that South Africa has been seeing some promising signs of decline in Covid-19 transmissions.
Ramaphosa noted that the country has recorded its lowest daily increase in infections since the beginning of December last year.
“In fact, the average rate of new infections has been steadily coming down over the last three weeks, indicating that we have now passed the peak of the second wave.
“In the past seven days, the daily average of new infections was around 5,500, compared to just over 10,000 infections in the previous seven days. In other words, the average number of daily new infections has come down to almost half of what it was,” he said.
The President further said the number of hospital admissions was also declining.
“At the peak of the second wave, we recorded over 2,300 hospital admissions in a day. This had fallen to 295 hospital admissions by the 29th of January.
“While all the indicators are heading in the right direction, we are still experiencing relatively high rates of transmission,” he added.
On vaccines, he continued to say that more were expected to arrive in the country mid-February, with further vaccines from other companies are expected in the second quarter of 2021.
This is after the arrival of the 1.5 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine from India earlier on Monday.
Ramaphosa said the other 500,000 doses from India will arrive in February, while 12 million are coming from the Covax programme.
The President further said that 9 million doses would be coming from Johnson & Johnson, with Pfizer/BioNTech committing approximately 20 million doses. He added that no one will be given the Covid-19 vaccine against their will.
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