Fewer than 1,000 Covid-19 cases in 24 hours, as positivity rate drops to 3.2%

SA recorded just fewer than 1,000 new Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours, health minister Dr Zweli Mkhize said on Tuesday night.

This means that there have been 1,522,697 total cases recorded across SA to date.

The new cases, said Mkhize in a statement, came from 30,762 tests — a positivity rate of 3.22%. This is significantly lower than the 10% to 12% positivity rate at the onset of the country's second wave of Covid-19 infections.

Mkhize said on Tuesday that 103 new Covid-19 related fatalities had been recorded in the past 24 hours, taking the total number of deaths to 50,906.

Of the newly recorded deaths, Gauteng and the Free State each had 28, 24 were in KwaZulu-Natal, 15 in the Western Cape, six in Mpumalanga and two in the Eastern Cape. There were no Covid-19 deaths recorded in the North West, Northern Cape or Limpopo.

In terms of vaccinations, Mkhize said that the number of health-care workers to receive their shots had risen to 118,247 as of 6.30pm on Tuesday.

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