By AFP
South Africa has recorded no deaths linked to COVID-19 in 48 hours, a first since May 2020 for the country officially the most affected on the continent, the country’s health authorities announced on Tuesday.
The National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) announced the news in its daily count of cases, reported from across the country, triggering cautious optimism.
The last time the country had no deaths from COVID-19 was on May 12, 2020.
“We observe that hospitals have almost no more COVID cases,” Shabir Madhi, a vaccine specialist at the University of the Witwatersrand, told AFP.
“We know that reported deaths are underestimated by a factor of three, but even then the rate is particularly low,” he adds, saying these results are linked to vaccination and previous waves of the pandemic.
“The cost in human lives was heavy, but it allowed a large part of the population to develop protection against severe forms of the disease,” he adds.
At least 80 percent of the densely populated province of Gauteng, where Johannesburg is located, has already been infected with COVID, a proportion he says roughly mirrors that prevailing in the country.
Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique and Eswatini have not reported any COVID-related deaths in the past 24 hours, even though these neighboring countries benefit from less developed health monitoring.
South Africa has lost 100,000 people to COVID and has nearly 3.6 million people infected.
