South Africa’s president again imposed a ban on alcohol sales and ordered the closure of all bars as part of new restrictions to help the country fight the resurgence of the coronavirus, including a new variant.
In a national speech on Monday, Cyril Ramaphosa also announced the closure of all beaches and public pools at the country’s pockets of infection, which include Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and several coastal areas.
In addition, South Africa is extending its night curfew by four hours, requiring all residents to be home from 9 pm to 6 am, the president said.
“Reckless behavior due to alcohol intoxication contributed to increased transmission. Alcohol-related accidents and violence are putting pressure on our hospital’s emergency units, ”said Ramaphosa.
“As we had to do in the early days of the blockade, we now have to flatten the curve to protect our health system’s ability to allow it to respond effectively to this new wave of infections.”
Ramaphosa said the ban on the sale of alcohol and other new restrictions would take effect at midnight on Monday. They include wearing masks in public, and anyone found without wearing a mask in a public place will be subject to a fine or criminal charge punishable by a possible prison sentence, the president said.
Ramaphosa said the tightening of restrictions is necessary because of an increase in Covid-19 infections, which has pushed the total confirmed cases of viruses in South Africa beyond 1 million.
“It is known that about 27,000 South Africans died from Covid-19. The number of new coronavirus infections is rising at an unprecedented rate, ”he said. “More than 50,000 new cases have been reported since Christmas Eve.”
Ramaphosa announced the new measures after a cabinet meeting and an emergency meeting of the national coronavirus command board. He said the new restrictions will be reviewed in a few weeks and a relaxation will only be considered when the number of new cases and hospitalizations decreases.
The country surpassed the 1 million confirmed virus cases on Sunday night, when authorities reported that the country’s total cases during the pandemic reached 1,004,413, including 26,735 deaths.
Like Britain, South Africa is battling a variant of Covid-19 that medical experts consider more infectious than the original. The variant has become dominant in many parts of the country, according to experts.
The South African Medical Association, which represents nurses and other health professionals, as well as doctors, warned on Monday that the health system was about to be overburdened by the combination of more Covid-19 patients and people who need urgent alcohol care -related incidents. Many vacation gatherings involve high levels of alcohol consumption, which in turn usually leads to an increase in trauma cases.
When South Africa previously had a total ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages, trauma cases in hospitals dropped by up to 60%, according to government statistics. When the ban on alcohol sales was lifted, trauma cases returned to previous levels.
South Africa’s seven-day continuous average of confirmed daily cases has increased in the past two weeks, from 11.18 new cases per 100,000 people on December 13 to 19.87 new cases per 100,000 people on December 27.
As European Union countries began launching the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, which was approved by the bloc’s regulators last week, Spain he said he is creating a register of people who refuse to be vaccinated and will share it with other member countries.
The vaccine will not be mandatory in Spain, but Salvador Illa, Spain’s Minister of Health, told Spanish TV that the best way to defeat the virus was to “vaccinate us all – the more the better”.
Eight homeworkers in Germany were accidentally injected with five doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, local officials said on Monday – but they are not suffering serious ill effects so far.
The seven women and a man, aged 38 to 54, are employees of a nursing home in the city of Stralsund in north-eastern Germany.
South Korea said on Tuesday it would sign an agreement with Moderna to offer Covid-19 vaccines to 20 million people, Yonhap news agency reported quoting the presidential office. The country recorded 40 deaths on Tuesday, a daily record.
This came a day after authorities promised to speed up efforts to launch a public coronavirus vaccination program, as the country detected its first cases of the virus variant linked to the rapid rise in infections in Britain.
Other developments include:
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Thailand confirmed 155 new cases of coronavirus on Tuesday, most of which were locally transmitted infections, the ministry of public health said.
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Indian Health officials said on Tuesday they found six people who returned from Britain in the past few weeks positive for the new most infectious strain of coronavirus. All six patients were kept isolated.
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O U.S military personnel began to vaccinate personnel in Japan and South Korea.