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South Africa was aiming to immunise 41-million people by the end of the year in order to reach herd immunity, the point at which Covid-19 was no longer spreading.
But this level of community protection is hard to achieve when the goal posts keep moving with the emergence of new variants
Instead, South Africa is now rethinking its plan and moving towards a containment strategy to reduce strain on the country’s health system
Achieving full community protection, or herd immunity, against Covid-19 through vaccinations by 2022 is no longer on the table for South Africa. The country now sets its sights on a less lofty goal called “containment”, which aims to immunise just enough people so that Covid hospital admissions put no more strain on the health system than any other illness would, experts say.
By the end of Tuesday, 1 June, 637,801 people in South Africa had received their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. This is an increase of 72,465 from the previous day.
Meanwhile, thousands of community healthcare workers, community development practitioners and civil society volunteers went to pension payout sites across the country to convince pensioners to register for the vaccine and assist them in doing so.
Volunteers are from the SA Medical Research Council, the Red Cross, Unicef, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the National Institute of Communicable Diseases, the national Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, and the national Department of Health.