Thousands of new Covid-19 infections, dozens of deaths and hospital admissions

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) on Wednesday reported a significantly high number of new Covid-19 infections and Covid-19 related deaths.

In a statement, the institute said 4,406 new infections had been reported. This rise reflects a 15.8% increase in positivity rate.

“There may be a backlog of Covid-19 mortality cases reported due to the current audit effort by the national department of health. Today [Thursday], the NDoH reports 65 fatalities, with five occurring during the past 24-48 hours. This puts the overall number of fatalities to 100,276,” said the NICD on Thursday.

On the high positivity rate, NICD executive director Prof Adrian Puren said: “The public should exercise caution in interpreting the data as there may be changes in test patterns. An early warning indicator, wastewater detection surveillance, shows an increase in Gauteng.”

Gauteng accounted for the most  cases at 49%. KwaZulu-Natal accounted for 22% while the Western Cape accounted for 15%. The Eastern Cape accounted for 5%. Free State, Mpumalanga and North West each accounted for 2% respectively; Limpopo and Northern Cape each accounted for 1% of today’s new cases.

The NICD said it was seeing a rise in Covid-19 hospitalisations, with 66 admissions recorded in the past 24 hours.

“There is evidence of small increases in Covid-19 hospitalisation in Gauteng, Free State and KwaZulu-Natal but we have seen no increases in Covid-19 hospital deaths,” notes Dr Waasila Jassat, lead of the DATCOV Covid-19 national hospital surveillance at the division of public health surveillance and response.

TimesLIVE

Support independent journalism by subscribing to the Sunday Times. Just R20 for the first month.