Photo: GCIS
‘We want to assure South Africans that we have not yet hit the (Covid-19) third wave however we are at risk” – DOH
Photo: GCIS
South African has not yet hit the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic although the number of new cases is still rising rapidly the Deprment of Health announced in a statement on Wednesday night.
In its statement on rising cases the DOH said the South Africa has a daily surveillance system which monitors the key indicators for resurgence and the main indicators that are monitored are mainly daily positive cases; the positivity rate; which is the number of positive tests divided by the total tests done; hospital admissions and mortality
“For ease of comparison, we normally report on trends and we do the 7 day average as daily cases fluctuate and are hence not very useful,” the DOH said.
In the last reporting week (3-9 May 2021) the DOH noted the following:
“Cumulatively, 56 059 HCW have tested positive, of these 14.35% (7 839/56 059) required admission, 6 881 (87,78%) have been discharged, and 83 are currently admitted. Health care workers constitute 3.51% of all cases of COVID-19 reported in the country. Accumulatively, a total of 874 deaths have been recorded among the health care workers,” the DOH said.
“Hospital admissions have not shown an increase. As much as these figures are worrying, our resurgence dashboard, which was developed by the South African Covid-19 Modelling Consortium, which is updated thrice a week, still shows that we have not reached a resurgence threshold though some districts in the country are fast approaching the threshold.”
Department of Health
The National Department of Health is working with provinces to update their resurgence plans to ensure that these are activated, and these plans mainly focus on the following:
“As the country we are on high alert and we know that the main drivers of the new wave will either be the resurgence of new variants and/or the fatigue from adherence to non-pharmaceutical interventions. To counter these we are working closely with our genomic sequencing team to ensure that we are able to pick up the new variants earlier,” the DOH said.
“We want to assure South Africans that we have not yet hit the third wave however we are at risk and we hence need to be on heightened vigilance as a country.”
Deparment of Health