Phaahla: SA’s COVID-19 infections steady for now
South Africa’s COVID-19 infection rate has reached a plateau for now, but Minister of Health, Joe Phaahla, believes that matters will improve once schools have settled in.
Phaahla said that there was no serious decline nor worrying rise in infections during a COVID-19 update earlier this morning. It comes just days after Cabinet approved changes to the country’s Alert Level 1 lockdown restrictions.
Opening of schools
He added that the change from a decline to a plateau was due to the opening of schools.
“Our epidemiologists believe that the stagnation in the slowing down of new infections can be linked to the opening of schools. Over the last 14 days, we have witnessed more infections among those 20 years and younger,” said Phaahla.
Over the past week, the country has seen a decrease of 0,3% in new cases. Only three provinces saw an increase – Free State at 20%, Gauteng at 17% and Mpumalanga at 12%. Limpopo has the highest positivity rate averaging at 20%.
‘We have reason to be optimistic’
“We have reason to be optimistic that as people settle down in their areas of residence after the holidays, and schools settle down, there will be stability. This will lead to a decline in the rate of infections,” he explained.
In hospitals, only 4.2% of capacity is being used for COVID-19 patients in general wards. And in the Intensive Care Units (ICUs), only 7.5% of capacity has been utilised.
Dr Waasila Jassat, part of the Public Health Specialist Response at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), said was no strain on bed capacity, oxygen, or critical cables.
Jassat added: “There are still pockets of people who are either unvaccinated or have not had prior infection. Almost 6 000 people died so I think people shouldn’t be too comforted by the very mild fourth wave.”
Positivity rate
Phaahla said it is expected the country’s positivity rate will drop to 5% by end of February. It is currently sitting at 10.6%.
However, a fifth wave is anticipated as the winter months approach and it could arrive sooner if new variants of concern emerge.
#COVID19 UPDATE: 30,785 tests were conducted in the last 24hrs, with 3,266 new cases, representing a 10.6% positivity rate. Today, @HealthZA reports 82 deaths, of which 12 occurred in the past 24-48 hours. Total fatalities are 95,545 to date. More here: https://t.co/Ap1gdYcqJx pic.twitter.com/5nAi6KKhTt
— NICD (@nicd_sa) February 3, 2022
To date, 18 million people have received at least one vaccine dose and 41% of those eligible are fully vaccinated.
“The only way to get closer to normality is if more of us vaccinate including boosters,” said the minister.
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Phaahla: SA’s COVID-19 infections steady for now
by Nompilo Gwala, Health-e News
February 4, 2022