Earlier this week we saw the death toll in South Africa surpass the 10 000 mark as a result of COVID-19. While this does not make for good reading in terms of the SA’s efforts to lessen the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears as if the number of new daily infections is falling.
It is still too early to say whether we are indeed flattening the curve on the spread of the virus, but the National Department of Health (NDoH) recorded 2 511 new infections over the past 24 hours.
This is significantly less than a couple of weeks ago, where we regularly climbed past the 10k mark for new daily infections.
For now the department has not commented on why the rate of new infections has declined so rapidly, but testing still appears to be high, with 3 278 977 tests completed to date.
Following the latest figures, our number of cases throughout the country currently sit at 566 109, with 426 125 recoveries also recorded. This translates to a recovery rate of 75.27 percent, which at least bodes well for the newly recorded cases.
As for the 50 unallocated cases that we’ve been seeing for the past few weeks, they remains the same, but precisely why they are yet to allocated is unclear for now.
The full breakdown of COVID-19 in South Africa is as follows:
Province | Confirmed Cases | Recoveries | Active cases | Deaths |
Western Cape | 100 316 | 87 998 | 12 318 | 3 454 |
Eastern Cape | 82 715 | 77 550 | 5 165 | 2 286 |
Northern Cape | 6 861 | 3 391 | 2 859 | 68 |
Free State | 29 209 | 13 478 | 15 731 | 414 |
KwaZulu-Natal | 100 494 | 56 758 | 43 736 | 1 450 |
North West | 22 031 | 12 245 | 9 786 | 150 |
Mpumalanga | 19 533 | 16 416 | 3 117 | 149 |
Gauteng | 194 093 | 150 082 | 44 011 | 2 653 |
Limpopo | 10 807 | 8 207 | 2 600 | 127 |
Unknown | 50 | |||
TOTAL | 566 109 | 426 125 | 139 984 | 10 751 |
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 Jacques Nel on Unsplash]