South Africa has recorded its highest daily coronavirus death toll of 383 and a daily record number of 19,506 new cases since the third wave hit the country a month ago, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) confirmed on Thursday.
These figures have brought the cumulative total to 1,973,972 infections and 60,647 deaths since the outbreak of the pandemic here in March 2020, the NICD said.
According to the institute, the Covid-19 case increase represented a 27.6% positivity rate, with Gauteng province remaining the epicentre of the disease — accounting for the majority of new cases (57%) — followed by the Western Cape province (11%) and North West province (7%).
“An increase of 698 hospital admissions were reported in the past 24 hours,” the NICD noted, adding that there are 12,893 Covid-19 patients in the country’s hospitals.
The NICD said the country’s health workers have so far conducted 13,133,428 tests in both public and private sectors, of which 70,593 tests were performed on Wednesday.
South Africa vaccinated over 120,000 people during the past 24-hour period, resulting in over 3,000,000 jabs so far since February 2021 — using both the Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, the NICD said.
There are 181,521,067 cumulative confirmed global cases of Covid-19, with 3,937,437 deaths and 2,915,585,482 doses administered since the outbreak of the pandemic in December 2019, according to the UN World Health Organisation.
NM/jn/APA