It’s the question everyone is asking: when will the third wave hit us?
The Western Cape government has decided to put the power in the public’s hands to answer that question for itself.
Public health expert Dr Muzzammil Ismail, from the University of Cape Town, said at a press conference on Thursday that this came about after several requests from the public.
We need to keep the reproduction number under one, and it has just gone above that. This puts us on high alert.
— Dr Keith Cloete
“A question I get asked several times a day is whether the third wave is about to happen,” he said, adding the Resurgence Monitor, which went live on the dashboard late on Thursday, will “provide everyone with the ability to answer that question in real time as it’s happening”.
A tutorial will also be uploaded on the site to assist those in understanding it.
Said Ismail: “The way to interpret the data is as follows: We look at the number of cases over seven days. We then count the same for the previous week or two, and then compare the percent change over those weeks. If there is a more than 10% increase, we regard it as an ‘alert’. If it goes over 20%, we say it is a resurgence.”
He said two graphs would help the public determine the current picture.
He added: “We are watching for wave three – we have not yet reached it, but some alerts are registering in terms of the proportion of positive cases, and that is why we are watching very carefully.”
Responding to these alerts, head of health in the province Dr Keith Cloete said markers such as hospitalisations, deaths and oxygen use were “stable”, but the average proportion of positive cases had gone up.
He said also that of particular concern were upticks in affluent areas.
“We need to keep the reproduction number under one,” he said at a press conference on Thursday. “And it has just gone above that. This puts us on high alert.”
He said this had also happened recently but then dropped again, which is why the department “is in a vigilant phase to make sure it doesn’t sustain above one”.
The reproduction rate is the number of new cases arising from each infectious case.
Daily averages in the province are stable at 120 new cases a day, 25 hospitalisations and three deaths.
However, he added: “What concerns us is that the average proportion of positive cases has gone up by 5% since the beginning of May.”
The private sector was showing higher proportions of positive cases, with “specific pockets in the metro” and “affluent suburbs” standing out.
In rural areas, cases remain unchanged, with wide variation but small numbers across all districts.
Focusing on data from surveillance teams “on the ground”, Cloete said bowling clubs in the Tygerberg district had been earmarked as sites of rises in cases and that this was a “new phenomenon”.
Wastewater studied by the Medical Research Council had also produced worrying data on Mitchells Plain, where levels of detectable Sars-CoV-2 were the highest they had been this year.
The province overall has 760 patients in acute hospitals – 335 of whom are in private hospitals.
Dr Cloete said his department was also concerned for red flags popping up in other parts of SA.
“We have seen an increase in other provinces like Gauteng, and that is now of concern to us too.”
He said scientists were also “on alert” regarding “variants of concern”, particularly the B1.617 causing havoc in India, but that the scientists believed the variant that had been dominant in SA since late last year would remain as such.
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