Cape Town – A total of 1 245 new Covid-19-related cases have been identified in South Africa since the last report.
As of Monday, the cumulative number of detected Covid-19 cases is 752 269, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said in a statement on Monday.
A total of 73 more Covid-19-related deaths have been reported: Eastern Cape 32, Free State 23, Gauteng 7 and Western Cape 11. This brings the total number of deaths to 20 314, he said.
Of the 73 deaths, 15 reportedly occurred in the last 48 hours: seven in the Eastern Cape, two in Gauteng and six in the Western Cape.
The number of recoveries now stand at 695 496, which translates to a recovery rate of 92.5%. The cumulative number of tests conducted to date is 5 142 947, with 12 755 new tests conducted since the last report.
Four of the top five deadliest Covid-19 hospitals in the country are in the Eastern Cape, according to an analysis of hospital admissions data for 100 hospitals which have admitted more than 50 patients since the Covid-19 outbreak began in March. The data was published by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases.
When ranked in terms of the overall percentage of patients who died after being admitted to a hospital with Covid-19, only one private hospital was in the top 50 of the worst-performing hospitals in the country.
Meanwhile, as the world celebrates advances in vaccines against the novel coronavirus, a top WHO expert warned in an interview with AFP that public distrust risked rendering even the most effective treatments useless against the pandemic.
"A vaccine that sits in a freezer or in a refrigerator or on a shelf and doesn’t get used is doing nothing to help shorten this pandemic," said Kate O’Brien, director of the World Health Organization's immunisation department.
US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech announced on Monday that their prospective vaccines had proven 90% effective in preventing Covid-19 infections in ongoing final phase trials involving more than 40 000 people.
Moderna Inc said on Monday its experimental vaccine was 94.5% effective in preventing Covid-19 based on interim data from a late-stage clinical trial.
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