Covid-19: Delta variant now dominates South Africa (officers)

The country’s health officials said the highly contagious delta variant, first detected in India, is now the dominant strain in South Africa.

“This new strain is actually very transmissible, more than any other strains, including the South African beta version,” said Tulio D’Olivera, a member of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Coronavirus and director of innovation and sequencing in KwaZulu. Natal (crisp).

He explained that when transmission increases too rapidly, hospitals across the country are overwhelmed and the number of deaths increases, not only from COVID-19 but also from other diseases.

The data on the spread of the delta variant in the country was collected on the basis of samples spread in KwaZulu-Natal province, D’Olivera reported, noting that the increase in new cases of Covid-19 in Gauteng province was mainly due to this highly permeable disease. Because of the version. .

For her part, the chair of the Ministerial Advisory Committee, Koleka Malisana, stressed the urgent need to strengthen containment measures and restrict the movement of people to deal with the surge in new cases, calling for a complete ban on gatherings .

“The advent of the delta version has radically changed the predictions of modelers for the third wave,” she said, adding that “we can already see that Gauteng’s hospitals are in big trouble.”

South Africa, officially the country most affected by the pandemic on the continent, is still lagging behind in the race for vaccinations. It has so far only been successful in vaccinating 2.6 million people out of a total population of 59 million.

The country has so far recorded 1.9 million positive cases of coronavirus, including over 59,000 deaths.

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