JOHANNESBURG (PA) – South Africa’s COVID-19 has led to more than 1 million confirmed cases on Sunday, and President Cyril Ramaphosa has convened an emergency meeting of the National Coronavirus Command Board.
The new variant of coronavirus in the country, 501.V2, is more contagious and has quickly become dominant in many areas of the renaissance, according to experts.
As hospitals in South Africa reach capacity and there is no sign of new growth, Ramaphosa will announce a return to restrictive measures to slow the spread of the disease.
“We are not helpless in the face of this,” infectious disease specialist Dr. Richard Lessells told the Associated Press. “We can change our behavior to give the virus fewer opportunities to spread.” He said it is most important to avoid contact with others indoors and indoors.
South Africa announced on Sunday night a cumulative total of 1,004,431 cases confirmed by COVID-19. This number includes 26,735 deaths in a country of 60 million people.
“One million cases is a serious stage, but the true number of cases and deaths is almost certainly much higher,” Lessells said.
“We have seen the new variant spread rapidly,” he said, noting that genomic sequencing shows that it has become dominant in the coastal provinces of Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. It is not yet certain whether the variant is equally dominant in inland Gauteng, which includes Johannesburg and is the most populous province in the country.
“As people return from vacation to the coastal areas, we can expect them to come with them,” Lessells said. “We can also expect travelers to take them across borders to other African countries.”
The mutation of the COVID-19 virus has made it more efficiently linked to the cells in our body, experts say.
Vaccinations have not yet reached South Africa, although Ramaphosa said he expects 10% of the country’s 60 million people to be inoculated in the first months of 2021.
The seven-day average in South Africa of daily new cases has almost doubled in the last two weeks, from 10.24 new cases per 100,000 people on December 12 to 19.86 new cases per 100,000 people on December 26. The death toll has almost doubled with the seven-day rolling average of daily deaths in South Africa rising in the past two weeks from 0.25 deaths per 100,000 people on December 12 to 0.48 deaths per 100,000 people on December 26.