By John Ikani
The Omicron variant has propelled a sharp rise in coronavirus cases in South Africa in recent weeks, health officials told Parliament Wednesday, calling the situation “worrying”.
Dr Michelle Groome of South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) said there had been an “exponential increase” in infections over the past two weeks, from a weekly average of around 300 new cases per day to 1,000 last week, and most recently 3,500.
On Wednesday, South Africa recorded 8,561 cases. A week earlier, the daily tally was 1,275.
“The degree of increase is worrying,” Groome said.
South Africa was the first country to detect Omicron, a new variant of the coronavirus with a high number of mutations, reporting its first cases on November 25 to the World Health Organization.
In Gauteng, South Africa’s most populous and most affected province which includes the city of Johannesburg, the rate of tests coming back positive rose to 27 percent on Wednesday.
Groome said the figures represented “very early stages of the fourth wave” of Covid-19 infections.
South Africa is the country hit hardest on the continent by the pandemic with almost three million cases.
That figure was “underestimated, far below the true number of real cases,” Groome said, highlighting that “some (people) are asymptomatic” and others “for all sorts of reasons may not test”.
