Covid-19 Daily Update: SA records 931 new confirmed cases with 66 related deaths.

By Lehlohonolo Lehana.

South Africa has recorded 66 more Covid-19 related deaths in the past day, bringing the total number of deaths in the country to 53 322.

A total of 23 013 more tests were completed in the past day. The number of tests conducted to date is 10 138 936.

North West recorded the highest number of deaths with 35 followed by Free State with 15, Western Cape with 10, Gauteng with 6 and Eastern Cape 1.

The Eastern Cape, Kwa-Zulu Natal, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, and Northern Cape all recorded zero Covid-19 related deaths.

SA recorded 931 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the past 24 hours bringing the cumulative number of cases in the country to 1 558 458 Covid-19 cases, while our cumulative recoveries today stand at 1 483 296.

To date more than 288 000 people have been vaccinated in the country.

Meanwhile the coronavirus variant discovered in SA may evade the protection provided by Pfizer/BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study in Israel found, though its prevalence in the country is very low and the research has not been peer reviewed.

The study, released on Saturday, compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for Covid-19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine, against the same number of unvaccinated patients with the disease.

It matched age and gender, among other characteristics.

The South African variant, B. 1.351, was found to make up about 1% of all the Covid-19 cases across all the people studied, according to the study by Tel Aviv University and Israel’s largest health care provider, Clalit.

But among patients who had received two doses of the vaccine, the variant’s prevalence rate was eight times higher than those unvaccinated — 5.4% versus 0.7%.

This suggests the vaccine is less effective against the South African variant, compared with the original coronavirus and a variant first identified in Britain that has come to comprise nearly all Covid-19 cases in Israel, the researchers said.

“We found a disproportionately higher rate of the South African variant among people vaccinated with a second dose, compared to the unvaccinated group. This means that the South African variant is able, to some extent, to break through the vaccine’s protection,” said Tel Aviv University’s Adi Stern.

The researchers cautioned, though, that the study only had a small sample size of people infected with the South African variant because of its rarity in Israel.

They also said the research was not intended to deduce overall vaccine effectiveness against any variant, since it only looked at people who had already tested positive for Covid-19, not at overall infection rates.

Pfizer declined to comment on the Israeli study.

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