SAâs Covid-19 deaths climb to 53 940
By IOL Reporter
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Durban - South Africaâs Covid-19 death toll rose to 53 940 on Wednesday after 53 more people succumbed to the virus, the Department of Health said.
As of Wednesday, the cumulative number of Covid-19 cases for South Africa stood 1 569 935, the departmentâs daily report revealed.
The number of tests conducted to as of Wedneday totalled 10 413 180 and of these 34 091 tests were completed since the last report.
Of the 53 new deaths reported, the Eastern Cape accounted for 17, the Free State 11, Gauteng 8, KwaZulu-Natal 3, Limpopo 0, Mpumalanga 1, North West 0, Northern Cape 9,and the Western Cape 4.
South Africaâs cumulative recoveries stood at 1 495 864, representing a recovery rate of 95%.
Covid 19 coronavirus: South Africa s mysterious second-wave turnaround
15 Mar, 2021 05:35 AM
7 minutes to read
By: Ben Graham
It has been a matter of weeks since South Africa was on the verge of a disaster.
Experts had predicted chaos as a new variant of the coronavirus tore through the country of 60 million people at the start of the year, and doctors were bracing for the worst.
The strain which appeared to be reinfecting people who had recovered from a previous bout of Covid-19 and raised serious questions about an impending vaccination rollout was infecting nearly 22,000 people a day by the middle of January.
When identified late last year, medical professionals were concerned that the variant – known as 501.v2 – would drive up Covid-19 infections. Professor Salim Abdool Karim said the strain had a higher viral load, meaning it could spread between people with ease. The infection rate rapidly increased, with President Cyril Ramaphosa reintroducing level 3 lockdown restrictions. As Gabriele Steinhauser of The Wall Street Journal writes, ‘A new coronavirus strain was surging across the country, thousands of holidaymakers were due to return from Covid-19 hot spots, and one in three coronavirus tests was coming back positive’. Then all of a sudden, cases of Covid-19 started to drop. ‘The cause of this steep decline in cases remains somewhat of a mystery’, says The Wall Street Journal, with Harry Moultrie of the NICD even telling Steinhauser ‘anybody who professes certainty [about why infections started dropping] is lying’. – Jarryd Neves
Following an article published in the Daily Maverick, co-ordinator at PANDA (pandemic – data and analytics) has written a response to the piece that he describes as a ‘ tabloid-grade hit piece’. ‘The authors take aim at PANDA’s models. They criticise PANDA’s mortality model for supposedly predicting 10,000 confirmed Covid deaths in the first wave (PANDA’s model was in fact the most accurate model produced for South Africa and we estimated 20,000 deaths in the very first paper we produced). Yet, they make not a peep about government’s model of 351,000 confirmed Covid deaths (not “excess deaths”) in the first wave. Read Hudson’s right of response below.
SA researchers unveil national Covid-19 dashboard
By Sisonke Mlamla
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Cape Town - A multi-disciplinary team of researchers from some of the countryâs universities and civil society have put their heads together to develop a Covid-19 dashboard to analyse the resurgence risk, monitor hospital admissions and present other essential data relating to the pandemic.
The dashboard was unveiled by the South African Covid-19 Modelling Consortium (SACMC) as its new SACMC epidemic explorer to enable the public to assess the Covid-19 risk level in any district in the country.
The consortium facilitated by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) comprised a group of researchers from UCT, Stellenbosch University (SU) and the University of the Witwatersrand, as well as non-profit organisations and government institutions.