JOHANNESBURG (AP) – South Africa’s COVID-19 spike brought the country to more than 1 million confirmed cases on Sunday, and President Cyril Ramaphosa called an emergency meeting of the National Coronavirus Command Council.
The new variant of the coronavirus, 501.V2, is more contagious and has quickly become dominant in many areas of the resurgence, according to experts.
With hospitals in South Africa reaching capacity and there is no sign that the new wave is peaking, Ramaphosa is expected to announce a return to restrictive measures designed to slow the spread of the disease.
“We are not helpless against this variant,” said infectious disease specialist Dr. Richard Lessells to The Associated Press. “We can change our behavior to make the virus less likely to spread.” He said it is most important to avoid contact with others in confined spaces indoors.
South Africa announced a total of 1,004,431 confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Sunday evening. That number includes 26,735 deaths in a country of 60 million people.
“One million cases is a serious milestone, but the actual number of cases and deaths is almost certainly much higher,” Lessells said.
“We have seen the new variant spread rapidly,” he said, noting that genomic sequencing shows that it has become dominant in the coastal provinces of the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. It is not yet certain whether the variant is equally dominant in the inland province of Gauteng, which also includes Johannesburg and is the most populous province in the country.
“When people return from a holiday on the coast, we can expect to bring the variant with them,” Lessells said. “We can also expect travelers to take the variant across the border to other African countries.”
The mutation of the COVID-19 virus has allowed it to bind more efficiently to cells in our body, experts say.
The vaccinations have not yet reached South Africa, although Ramaphosa has said he expects 10% of the country’s 60 million people to be vaccinated in the first months of 2021.
The seven-day moving average of daily new cases in South Africa has nearly doubled in the past two weeks from 10.24 new cases per 100,000 people on December 12 to 19.86 new cases per 100,000 people on December 26. The number of deaths has also nearly doubled. With the seven-day moving average of daily deaths in South Africa, the past two weeks has increased from 0.25 deaths per 100,000 people on December 12 to 0.48 deaths per 100,000 people on December 26.