COVID-19 (South Africa) – 2021/09/17

Last week I expressed the hope that the mortality rate in the Free State will start moving downwards. And indeed, this happened over this past week, dropping from 0.27% to 0.19%. But then six of the other provinces and South Africa as a whole had an increase in their death rates. However, with the infection rates continuing their downward trends all over the country, we can foresee that the death rates will move downwards again soon. Mpumalanga has now joined Gauteng and Limpopo with a number of infections per million below 50. I am fairly sure that by next week North-West will also fall into this category. Limpopo is now standing at 11 infections per million per day. Below 10 is a good indicator that things are fairly under control. Northern Cape is still the one province with over 250 infections per million per day, this 158 days after the third wave started in the province.

The case fatality rate is still moving upwards and is now at 2.99% for the entire time of the pandemic. However, for the past week this ratio rose to 4.78% (up from 3.01% last week) which simply means that for every 100 people who tested positive for COVID, almost five people died (almost two more than a week ago). On the other hand, the positivity rate of tests is now 9.96%, down from 13.8% last week. This is good news.

Although the number of vaccinations over this past week exceeded those of last week, we are still 320,000 short of 16 million vaccinations in total. The total number of people who are now fully vaccinated went over 7.7 million this week.

Looking at the number of people in hospitals and ICU in South Africa, we see that the number of people in hospitals went down to 9,384 (last week the number was 11,027) while those in ICU decreased to 1,413 (compared to 1,692 last week). Of those hospitalised, 843 are currently on ventilation (967 last week).

South Africa’s number of COVID-related mortalities is still greatly underreported. The number of excess deaths is updated weekly by the SAMRC and the actual number of people who had died because of COVID may be as much as three times higher than the 85,800 officially reported.

Now that the country is on Level 2 with the promise that the situation will be evaluated again within another week, my guess is that we can prepare ourselves to move to Level 1 by next Sunday. What is more difficult to predict is when the fourth wave will hit the country, but I cannot foresee that we will be spared this wave.