Health Minister Zweli Mkhize in his daily update said that the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in South Africa has risen by 5 297 over the past 24 hours, and 318 more deaths have been recorded during the same period.
The cumulative number of Covid-19 cases in the country now stands at 1 449 236 and the death toll at 43 951.
With 26.8 percent of the total number of positive cases, Gauteng remains the province hardest hit by the virus since the start of the pandemic last year.
KwaZulu-Natal has the second-highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases, accounting for 21.6 percent of the country’s overall cases.
The Northern Cape has so far registered the lowest number of Covid-19 cases, 31851, accounting for 2.2 percent of the national total.
The cumulative total of tests conducted to date is 8 245 124 with 41 540 new tests recorded since the last report, Mkhize said.
The number of patients who have recovered currently stands at 1 292 921, representing a recovery rate of 89 percent.
Mkhize said pregnant women and newborns will be exempted from the COVID-19 vaccination programme. This is because they didn’t participate in trials to determine the safety of the vaccine.
South Africa will receive its first one million doses of vaccines from India’s Serum Institute on Monday.
When they arrive, the vaccines will undergo quarantine and quality assurance processes, which could take up to 14 days before they are distributed to all provinces.
Mkhize said the vaccines show mild side effects.
“There haven’t been any recorded serious side effects. However, there are mild like reported allergic reactions and so on. There have not been trials done on pregnant women and new-born babies and therefore, there will not be included in the vaccination initially, until all of those issues are sorted out.”
Mkhize added taht way more than the original 40 million targets may have to vaccinated against COVID-19 for the country to achieve herd immunity. Mkhize said this all depends on the immune response.
“We are saying to get population immunity, we calculated that we need about 67 percent to 70 percent of the population to be vaccinated. It does depend on a number of issues. One of the issues is whether we’re using predominantly the vaccine that has got an efficacy of 90 or 60 and so on. If that is the situation it might change the numbers and so on. We might end up having to increase the number of people who must be vaccinated. There are still numbers of issues there that we are going to clarify.”
South Africa receives its first one-million doses of vaccines from India’s Serum Institute on Monday. When they arrive the vaccines will undergo quarantine and quality assurance processes which could take up to 14 days before they are distributed to all provinces.
Compiled by Lehlohonolo Lehana.