JOHANNESBURG (AP) – South Africa’s COVID-19 peak has brought the country to more than a million confirmed cases on Sunday and President Cyril Ramaphosa convened an emergency meeting of the National Coronavirus Command Council.
The country’s new variant of coronavirus, 501.V2, is more contagious and has quickly become dominant in many areas of the resurgence, experts say.
With South African hospitals hit and with no signs of the new rise reaching its peak, Ramaphosa is expected to announce a return to restrictive measures designed to curb the spread of the disease.
“We are not powerless in the face of this variant,” infectious disease specialist Dr. Richard Lessells. “We can change our behavior to give the virus fewer chances to spread.” He said it is very important to avoid contact with other people in indoor enclosed spaces.
South Africa announced a cumulative total of 1,004,431 confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Sunday evening. That number includes 26,735 deaths in a country of 60 million people.
“One million cases is a serious milestone, but the actual 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 known if the variant is so dominant in the inland province of Gauteng, which includes Johannesburg and is the most populous province in the country.
“As people return from vacation to coastal areas, we can expect them to take the variant with them,” Lessells said. “We can also expect travelers to take the variant with them across borders to other African countries.”
The COVID-19 virus mutation has made it bind more efficiently to the cells in our body, experts say.
Vaccinations have not yet reached South Africa, although Ramaphosa has said he expects to inoculate 10% of the country’s 60 million people during the first months of 2021.
The average of seven days of new cases in South Africa 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 26th. The death toll has also nearly doubled as the seven-day average daily death toll in South Africa has risen in the past two weeks, from 0.25 deaths per 100,000 people on 12 December to 0.48 deaths per 100,000 people on December 26th.