Tomorrow is Heritage Day (24th September), and while many in the country will be using this opportunity to have an extra long weekend, there is still the prospect of COVID-19 in South Africa to worry about, especially as many people will likely be interacting in the coming days.
As such it should serve as a litmus test for the country’s recent move to alert level 1, so it will be interesting to see how this impacts the daily infection rate moving forward.
Focusing on the past 24 hours, the National Department of Health (NDoH) has confirmed that 1 346 new cases have been recorded, pushing the country’s total to date to 663 282. The number of recoveries has also remained relatively high at 592 904, which translates to a recovery rate of 89.38 percent.
While the recovery rate remaining high can be viewed as a positive, the past 24 hours has seen a significant number of fatalities being reported. 126 to be more precise, with the NDoH noting that five are from the Eastern Cape, 54 from KwaZulu-Natal, 45 from Gauteng, five from North West, and 17 from the Western Cape.
This brings the total number of deaths related to COVID-19 in South Africa to 116 118.
The full breakdown of COVID-19 in South Africa is as follows:
Province | Confirmed Cases | Recoveries | Active cases | Deaths |
Western Cape | 109 616 | 102 266 | 7 350 | 4 138 |
Eastern Cape | 88 319 | 84 108 | 4 211 | 3 084 |
Northern Cape | 15 280 | 11 724 | 2 859 | 189 |
Free State | 44 616 | 29 283 | 15 333 | 838 |
KwaZulu-Natal | 117 972 | 108 684 | 9 288 | 2 586 |
North West | 28 331 | 24 101 | 4 230 | 341 |
Mpumalanga | 26 612 | 25 281 | 1 331 | 496 |
Gauteng | 217 759 | 193 701 | 24 058 | 4 084 |
Limpopo | 14 777 | 13 756 | 1 021 | 362 |
Unknown | 0 | |||
TOTAL | 663 282 | 592 904 | 70 378 | 16 118 |
As always, in order to stay up to date with the spread of COVID-19 in South Africa and abroad, we advise the following materials and platforms:
- Dr Zweli Mkhize on Twitter
- COVID-19 Connect on WhatsApp – add 0600 123 456 as a contact and say “Hi”.
- World Health Organisation
- SA Coronavirus website
- SA Government
- SA Presidency
[Image – Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash]