GOOD NEWS
South Africa, where the new variant of Covid-19 was detected last month, announced Thursday that it had passed the peak of the Omicron wave without a significant increase in the number of deaths.
“All indicators suggest that the country has probably passed the peak of the fourth wave” of the pandemic, the presidency said in a statement, announcing the lifting of certain health restrictions and in particular the night curfew. “A marginal increase in the number of deaths has been observed in all provinces,” she continued.
New contaminations fell by nearly 30% last week (89,781), compared to the previous week (127,753). And hospital admissions have declined in eight out of nine provinces: “Although the Omicron variant is highly transmissible, hospitalization rates have been lower than in previous waves,” the presidency said.
Omicron, which has a high number of mutations raising concerns about vaccine resistance, was first identified in Botswana and South Africa in late November. It quickly became dominant in South Africa, causing the number of infections to rise exponentially to more than 26,000 daily cases in mid-December, according to official statistics.