South Africa’s coronavirus death toll has breached the 60,000-mark as a third wave of the disease continued to batter the country, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) announced on Tuesday.
According to the NICD, the country’s death toll now stood at 60,038 after 138 people succumbed to the virus overnight.
Covid-19 cases continue to soar, with 12,222 new detected infections from the highly transmissible Delta variant from India that first hit the country a month ago — leading to the current aggressive third wave, the agency said.
The new infections have brought the total number of laboratory-confirmed cases to 1,941,119 — representing a 28.3% positivity rate, it added.
South Africa’s industrial hub, Gauteng, remained the hardest-hit province, accounting for 8,408 new cases (69%) on Tuesday, followed by 902 infections recorded in the Western Cape Province (7%) overnight, the NICD said.
“An increase of 512 hospital admissions have been reported in the past 24 hours nationwide,” the institute said, adding that there were 157,199 people who are currently infected of which 11,801 are receiving treatment in various hospitals in the country.
As of Monday evening, there were 180,817,269 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 3,923,238 deaths worldwide, records at the UN World Health Organisation show.
NM/jn/APA