Photo: Pixabay
Photo: Pixabay
The COVID-19 nightmare is entering its most terrifying phase in South Africa. Lockdown measures are powerless to stop the disease ripping through the country, and after breaking into the world’s top 20 places for confirmed infections, it seems SA is world-leader in the very unfortunate ‘doubling rate’ category.
Ridhwaan Suliman is a senior researches at CSIR. He has been tracking the pandemic’s impact on Mzansi since the first case was recorded back in March. Despite being able to suppress the virus at the start of lockdown, the number of cases has skyrocketed above 8 000 per day since the start of July.
What is the doubling rate?
This sharp increase in transmission has seen South Africa’s doubling rate reach an average of 13.7 days. Now, this particular rate is used to determine how fast COVID-19 cases take to ‘double’ from a certain date. South Africa has registered more coronavirus cases in the past two weeks than it did in the previous 12 weeks of lockdown.
Our doubling rate, therefore, now forms the highest percentage of any other nation in the top 20 most-affected countries. South Africa, in acrimonious fashion, tops a global chart that no-one would fancy scaling.
COVID-19: South Africa at the top of an unsettling chart
On Monday night, COVID-19 cases in SA broke through the 200 000 barrier. Although just under half of these patients have recovered – leaving about 108 000 active cases – the rise has been astoundingly alarming. Some provinces have even courted the idea of re-implementing hard lockdown laws to counter the spread.
While doubling rate in SA consistent around 13.7 days at the moment, out of TOP 20 countries by TOTAL confirmed cases (?? #16) SA has THE HIGHEST % DAILY INCREASE OR DOUBLING RATE as can also be seen from SLOPE of these curves
— Ridhwaan Suliman (@rid1tweets) July 6, 2020
Note % is wrt total cases i.e. SA at ~200k, US at ~3M pic.twitter.com/eM2FHUXY2v
