Today marks the one year anniversary since the country went into lockdown. While most anniversaries are cause for celebration, this one will call for reflection on the past 12 months having to deal with COVID-19 in South Africa.

This comes on the back of news regarding the vaccine rollout in the country, with the National Department of Health (NDoH) providing an update and seems to be an increasingly unlikely schedule for achieving population immunity, given the current number of vaccines that have been administered.

To that end, the latest report from the NDoH confirms that 220 129 vaccines have been administered, with five weeks left to inoculation a further 1.38 million by the end of April, which is what the department earmarked for the end of phase one of the rollout.

While we await more positive news on the vaccine front, there is still the daily infections to consider, with the past 24 hours seeing 1 554 new cases being reported. This pushes the total number of infections to date to 1 541 563, with 1 467 254 recoveries also being reported. As has been the case in recent weeks, the recovery rate has not budged from 95 percent.

Unfortunately, the NDoH says 163 new fatalities have been recorded, with Limpopo accounting for the majority at 71. The death toll related to COVID-19 in South Africa has since increased to 52 535.

The full breakdown of COVID-19 in South Africa is as follows:

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 Glen Carrie on Unsplash]