Over the weekend, much of the world collectively exhaled as Joe Biden won the 2020 US Presidential elections, but we’re not out of the woods yet as Donald Trump looks to fight the decision in court. The same goes for the coronavirus pandemic, and closer to home, we’ve seen the number of cases for COVID-19 in South Africa continue to rise.
To that end, the National Department of Health (NDoH) says 1 372 new cases have been recorded over the past 24 hours, pushing the country’s total to date to 727 278. The department also notes that 679 688 recoveries have been recorded, which sees the recovery rate rise to 92 percent.
When President Cyril Ramaphosa first confirmed that we would be moving to alert level 1 lockdown, he noted that the figure of 98 percent in terms of recovery rates, but it remains to be seen if that is the key figure for SA to move out of lockdown entirely.
Shifting back to the statistics, unfortunately 20 new fatalities have been recorded, as only two provinces have given updated numbers.
Here, 19 of the new 20 are from the Eastern Cape and one is from Gauteng. Whether this will result in a higher number of new fatalities later today, is unclear, but the total number of deaths related to COVID-19 now sits at 19 809.
The full breakdown of COVID-19 in South Africa is as follows:
Provinces | Confirmed Cases | Recoveries | Active cases | Deaths |
Western Cape | 119 242 | 110 365 | 8 877 | 4 397 |
Eastern Cape | 101 336 | 92 126 | 9 210 | 3 878 |
Northern Cape | 22 396 | 18 418 | 2 859 | 295 |
Free State | 57 935 | 45 872 | 12 063 | 1 564 |
KwaZulu-Natal | 124 011 | 115 344 | 8 667 | 3 255 |
North West | 33 855 | 29 809 | 4 046 | 475 |
Mpumalanga | 30 274 | 29 083 | 1 191 | 607 |
Gauteng | 230 299 | 221 662 | 8 637 | 4 862 |
Limpopo | 17 930 | 17 009 | 921 | 476 |
Unknown | 0 | |||
TOTAL | 737 278 | 679 688 | 57 590 | 19 809 |
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 Brian McGowan on Unsplash]