The South African president has re-imposed a ban on the sale of alcohol and ordered the closure of all bars as part of new restrictions to help the country combat the resurgence of coronavirus, including a new variant.
On Monday, in a nationwide speech, Cyril Ramaphosa also announced the closure of all public beaches and swimming pools in the country’s infection points, which include Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and several coastal areas.
In addition, South Africa extends the night curfew by four hours, requiring all residents to be home from 9pm to 6am, the president said.
“Reckless behavior due to alcohol intoxication has helped increase transmission. Alcohol-related accidents and violence are putting pressure on our hospital emergency units, ”Ramaphosa said.
“As we were supposed to do during the early days of the closure, we now need to flatten the curve to protect the capacity of our healthcare system and allow it to respond effectively to this new wave of infections.”
Ramaphosa said the ban on selling alcohol and other new restrictions would take effect Monday at midnight. They include the mandatory use of masks in public, and anyone who does not find a mask in a public place will be subject to a fine or a criminal charge punishable by a possible prison sentence, the president said.
Ramaphosa said the increase in restrictions is necessary due to an increase in Covid-19 infections that has brought the total number of confirmed cases of South African viruses to over one million.
“It is known that almost 27,000 South Africans died due to Covid-19. The number of new coronavirus infections is increasing at an unprecedented rate,” he said. “More than 50,000 new cases have been reported since Christmas night”.
Ramaphosa announced the new measures after a cabinet meeting and an emergency meeting of the national coronavirus command board. He said the new restrictions would be reviewed in a few weeks and that relaxation would only be taken into account when new cases and hospitalizations decreased.
The country surpassed the figure of 1 million in confirmed cases of virus on Sunday night, when authorities reported that the total cases in the country during the pandemic had reached 1,004,413, including 26,735 deaths.
Like Britain, South Africa is fighting a variant of Covid-19 that medical experts consider more infectious than the original. According to experts, the variant has become dominant in many parts of the country.
The South African Medical Association, which represents nurses and other health workers as well as doctors, warned Monday that the health system was about to be overwhelmed by the combination of a higher number of Covid-19 patients. and of people in urgent need of alcohol-related incidents. Many holiday meetings involve high levels of alcohol consumption, which in turn often lead to an increase in trauma cases.
When South Africa previously had a total ban on liquor sales, trauma cases in hospitals dropped to 60%, according to government statistics. When the ban on the sale of alcohol was lifted, trauma cases returned to previous levels.
The continued average of seven confirmed days from South Africa to South Africa has increased in the last two weeks, from 11.18 new cases per 100,000 people on December 13 to 19.87 new cases per 100,000 people on December 27th.
When European Union countries began deploying the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, which was approved last week by blockchain regulators, Spain he said a register of people refusing to be vaccinated was being set up and would share it with other member countries.
The vaccine will not be mandatory in Spain, but Salvador Illa, Spain’s health minister, told Spanish television that the best way to defeat the virus was to “vaccinate us all, the better.”
Eight workers at home Germany they were accidentally injected with five doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, local authorities said Monday, but so far have not suffered any serious effects.
The seven women and one man, aged between 38 and 54, are employees of a retirement home in the northeastern German city of Stralsund.
South Korea He said on Tuesday that he would sign an agreement with Moderna to offer Covid-19 vaccines to 20 million people, Yonhap news agency reported, citing the presidential office. The nation reported 40 deaths on Tuesday, a daily record.
This comes a day after officials pledged to step up efforts to launch a public coronavirus vaccination program, as the country detected its first cases of the virus variant related to the rapid rise in infections in Gran Brittany.
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Thailand confirmed 155 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, most of which were locally transmitted infections, the public health ministry said.
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