South Africa is now fully in the Covid-19 third wave with infections, hospitalisations, and deaths on the rise.
The latest reports on daily fatalities said as many as 100 people had succumbed to Covid-19 related illnesses. The total number of fatalities is 57 410 to date.
The country’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases said South Africa “technically” entered the third wave of Covid-19 on Thursday.
The evidence of a third wave is overwhelming.
Bafana Bafana superstar forward Percy Tau, who plays his football for Brighton in the English Premier League missed Thursday’s international friendly against Uganda at the Orlando Stadium after testing positive for Covid-19.
The national seven-day moving average incidence, which reached 5 959 cases, exceeded the new wave threshold defined by the Ministerial Advisory Committee of the government.
The threshold was defined as 30 percent of the peak incidence of the previous wave.
The statement released on Thursday also reported 9,149 new Covid-19 cases, bringing the national tally to 1,722,086. Thursday’s positivity testing rate was 15.7 percent.
Most new cases were reported in Gauteng province, which hosts the nation’s economic hub Johannesburg and the administrative capital Pretoria.
Gauteng recorded 61 percent of the cases, the statement said.
Western Cape province is second-worst affected with 10 percent of the new cases.
South Africa has recorded the highest Covid-19 cases in Africa at 1,712,939 while the northern African country of Morocco reported 522,389 cases as of Thursday.
Meanwhile, the government’s vaccination programme has roundly been criticised for being too slow.
Opposition politician Julius Malema, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, said rich South Africans were crossing the border into Zimbabwe to get Covid-19 vaccinations because they could not get vaccinated at home.
Malema has also demanded that public schools be closed to curb the spread of the disease.
