SA has 16,396 active cases of Covid-19

As of Thursday, South Africa has recorded a total of 2,924,978 positive cases of Covid-19, 2.819,130 recoveries and 89,452 deaths, which brings the total number of active cases to 16, 396.

356 new cases and 17 deaths were reported in the past 24 hours.

The majority of new cases today are from Gauteng (34%), followed by KwaZulu-Natal accounting for 19%. Western Cape accounted for 12%; Northern Cape accounted for 11%; Free State accounted for 9%; North West accounted for 5%; Limpopo and Mpumalanga each accounted for 4% respectively; and Eastern Cape accounted for 3% of today’s new cases.

18.835,534 tests have been conducted in both public and private sectors, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), a division of the National Health Laboratory Service, has announced.

There has been an increase of 41 hospital admissions in the past 24 hours.

The novel coronavirus has killed at least 5,071,273 people since the outbreak emerged in China in December 2019, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP at 1100 GMT on Thursday.

At least 251,370,630 cases of coronavirus have been registered. The vast majority have recovered, though some have continued to experience symptoms weeks or even months later.

The figures are based on daily reports provided by health authorities in each country.

They exclude revisions made by other statistical organisations, which show that the number of deaths is much higher.

The World Health Organization estimates that the pandemic’s overall toll could be two to three times higher than official records, due to the excess mortality that is directly and indirectly linked to Covid-19.

A large number of the less severe or asymptomatic cases also remain undetected, despite intensified testing in many countries.

On Wednesday, 8,598 new deaths and 539,099 new cases were recorded worldwide. Based on latest reports, the countries with the most new deaths were United States with 1,640 new deaths, followed by Russia with 1,237 and Ukraine with 651.

The United States is the worst-affected country with 759,060 deaths from 46,792,081 cases.

After the US, the hardest-hit countries are Brazil with 610,036 deaths from 21,909,298 cases, India with 462,189 deaths from 34,401,670 cases, Mexico with 290,374 deaths from 3,834,815 cases, and Russia with 251,691 deaths from 8,952,472 cases.

The country with the highest number of deaths compared to its population is Peru with 608 fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by Bulgaria with 368, Bosnia-Herzegovina with 362, Republic of North Macedonia with 349, Montenegro with 347, Hungary with 327 and Czech Republic with 292.

Latin America and the Caribbean overall has 1,527,769 deaths from 46,180,097 cases, Europe 1,441,170 deaths from 77,433,544 infections, and Asia 880,114 deaths from 56,322,651 cases.

The United States and Canada has reported 788,277 deaths from 48,529,470 cases, Africa 220,043 deaths from 8,548,896 cases, Middle East 210,916 deaths from 14,079,664 cases, and Oceania 2,984 deaths from 276,311 cases.

As a result of corrections by national authorities or late publication of data, the figures updated over the past 24 hours may not correspond exactly to the previous day’s tallies.

Additional reporting by AFP