By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD),reports 1,752 new COVID-19 cases that have been identified in South Africa, which brings the total number of laboratory-confirmed cases to 3,623,962.
The majority of new cases today are from Gauteng (34%), followed by Kwa-Zulu Natal (17%). Western Cape accounted for 15%; Mpumalanga accounted for 9% and North West accounted for 8%. Free State and Limpopo each accounted for 5% respectively; Eastern Cape accounted for 3% and Northern Cape accounted for 2% of today’s new cases.
This increase represents an 8.0% positivity rate.
The proportion of positive new cases/total new tested today is 8.0%, which is lower than yesterday (8.9%). The 7-day average is 9.2% today, which is lower than yesterday (9.4%).
Due to the ongoing audit exercise by the National Department of Health (NDoH), there may be a backlog of COVID-19 mortality cases reported. Today, the NDoH reports 18 deaths and of these, 8 occurred in the past 24 – 48 hours. This brings the total fatalities to 95, 835 to date.
As the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus continues its frenetic spread around the world, a new subvariant has been detected in dozens of countries.
The dominant form of Omicron, known as BA.1, continues to account for the vast majority of confirmed new COVID-19 infections globally, but another subvariant, known as BA.2, has begun to outcompete it in some places.
Some early studies have shown BA.2 appears to be more transmissible than the dominant BA.1 subvariant – leading scientists to ramp up their investigations.
The strain is being closely watched in countries including Denmark, India and Nepal where it has become dominant, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The WHO in a weekly update on February 1 said further investigations into the features of BA.2, including transmissibility, immune escape properties and virulence, should be prioritised independently (and comparatively) to BA.1.