Before we begin we’d like to take a moment to explain what is happening here.

“Why is a technology news website covering COVID-19 news,” is a question we’re bound to receive so we’re going to address it right here.

Regulations published by Stella Ndabeni-Abraham states that “all internet sites operating within .zaDNA top level domain name must have a landing page with a visible link to www.sacoronavirus.co.za”.

As we fall under that regulation, we are required to link to the Department of Health’s website but we’re taking that a step further.

Every morning and every afternoon we will publish an update regarding COVID-19 in South Africa. For the purpose of these updates we will refer solely to the following sources of information:

• National Institute for Communicable Diseases
• Department of Health
• The World Health Organisation
• South African Government

We understand that folks are doing amazing things with data-viz and there are comments from experts that can help, but our goal with these updates is to provide you, our reader, with accurate information from trusted sources. If the source is not reliable, it will not be linked here.

We will also be placing a banner on our home page which you can click at any time to be directed to www.sacoronavirus.co.za.

Our latest update follows on below:

It is the first day of South Africa lowering its national lockdown status to alert level 3, and with it a number of changes have come.

The first, as you can gauge from the header image above, is the sale of alcohol is no longer banned, and unsurprisingly many South Africans are heading to their local retailer in order to purchase beer, wine, spirits and other potables.

Schools were also set to re-open today for grade 7 and 12 learners, but an extremely late change to that plan has pushed it back to 8th June instead.

As for South Africa’s number of COVID-19 cases, a spike over the weekend has seen it rise to 32 683, which is an increase of 1 716, following Sunday’s statistics.

Added to this, the deal toll from COVID-19 has also risen to 683 at the time of writing.

Once again the Western Cape leads all provinces in terms of the number on positive cases at 21 382, with the full breakdown per province as follows:

With the presidency noting that alert level 3 will likely seen an even higher rate of positive cases in the country, it remains to seen what the statistics will look like at the end of June.

Added to this is what kind of impact it will have on plans to lower the lockdown status once again, or indeed moving other parts of the country to higher level, which the presidency has also confirmed as a possibility.

As always, in order to stay up to date with the spread of COVID-19 in South Africa and abroad, we advise the following materials and platforms:

• Dr Zweli Mkhize on Twitter
• COVID-19 Connect on WhatsApp – add 0600 123 456 as a contact and say “Hi”.
• World Health Organisation
• SA Coronavirus website
• SA Government
• SA Presidency.

[Image – Photo by Doan Ngoc Thanh on Unsplash]