JOHANNESBURG (AP) – South Africa’s COVID-19 peak led the country to more than 1 million confirmed cases on Sunday, and President Cyril Ramaphosa called an emergency meeting of the Coronavirus National Command Council.
The country’s new coronavirus variant, 501.V2, is more contagious and has quickly become dominant in many areas of resurgence, according to experts.
With South African hospitals reaching maximum capacity and no sign that the further increase has peaked, Ramaphosa is expected to announce a return to restrictive measures aimed at slowing the spread of the disease.
“We are not helpless in the face of this variant,” infectious disease specialist Dr. Richard Lessells told the Associated Press. “We can change our behavior to give the virus less opportunity to spread.” He said it is more important to avoid contact with others in closed and enclosed spaces.
South Africa announced an accumulated total of 1,004,431 confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Sunday night. That figure includes 26,735 deaths in a country of 60 million people.
“A million cases is a serious milestone, but the true number of cases and deaths is almost certainly much higher,” said Lessells.
“We saw the new variant spread quickly,” he said, pointing out that genomic sequencing shows that it has become dominant in the coastal provinces of Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. It is still unclear whether the variant is so dominant in Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg and is the country’s most populous province.
“As people return from vacation in coastal areas, we can expect them to bring the variant with them,” said Lessells. “We can also expect travelers to take the variant with them across borders to other African countries.”
The mutation of the COVID-19 virus has made it bind more efficiently to cells in our bodies, experts say.
Vaccines have not yet reached South Africa, although Ramaphosa said he expects 10% of the country’s 60 million inhabitants to be vaccinated in the first months of 2021.
South Africa’s seven-day continuous average of new daily cases has almost doubled in the past two weeks, from 10.24 new cases per 100,000 people on December 12 to 19.86 new cases per 100,000 people on December 26. The death toll has also nearly doubled with the seven-day moving average of daily deaths in South Africa has increased in the past two weeks from 0.25 deaths per 100,000 people on December 12 to 0.48 deaths per 100,000 people on December 26 .