Yesterday the country went into adjusted alert level 4 lockdown, with it set to remain at this level for the next two weeks until 11th July. Government hopes that stricter lockdown measures will have a positive effect on the spread of COVID-19 in South Africa, but as fears over the delta variant of the virus grows, it remains to be seen if we can indeed flatten the curve during this third wave.
Looking at the latest report from the National Department of Health (NDoH), there is no significant change yet, with 12 222 new cases being recorded over the past 24 hours. This pushes the total number of infections recorded to date to 1 941 119, with over 13.01 million tests having been conducted so far.
The recovery has not changed much over the past 24 hours either, sitting at 88.8 percent currently as 1 723 882 recoveries being recorded so far.
As for the most crucial metric at this stage, vaccines administered to date, the NDoH says 2 787 996 have been issued as of 17:00 on 28th June. Importantly, however, there is no indication regarding how many of these are the first dose of Pfizer vaccine anymore. Therefore the number of vaccines administered to date does not truly reflect that the inoculation status of the country is at present.
Either way, greater effort is needed to ramp up the vaccine rollout, as South Africa is now being surpassed by some of its African counterparts.
The last figure from the latest report shows that 138 new fatalities have unfortunately been recorded over the past 24 hours, as the death toll related to COVID-19 in South Africa climbs to 60 038.
The full breakdown of COVID-19 in South Africa is as follows:
| Provinces | Confirmed Cases | Recoveries | Active cases | Deaths |
| Western Cape | 319 392 | 290 014 | 17 078 | 12 300 |
| Eastern Cape | 205 859 | 189 937 | 4 077 | 11 845 |
| Northern Cape | 58 663 | 50 023 | 7 272 | 1 368 |
| Free State | 113 648 | 97 455 | 11 271 | 4 922 |
| KwaZulu-Natal | 352 401 | 329 156 | 12 584 | 10 661 |
| North West | 93 596 | 78 342 | 13 019 | 2 235 |
| Mpumalanga | 93 432 | 86 620 | 5 304 | 1 508 |
| Gauteng | 629 399 | 535 353 | 81 399 | 12 647 |
| Limpopo | 74 729 | 66 982 | 5 195 | 2 552 |
| Unknown | 0 | |||
| TOTAL | 1 941 119 | 1 723 882 | 157 199 | 60 038 |
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]
