Medical experts in South Africa are hopeful that a substantial drop in new case numbers of the coronavirus Omicron strain there may indicate that the virus is receding quickly after a ferocious spike in cases.
After hitting a high of nearly 27,000 new cases nationwide Thursday, the numbers dropped to about 15,424 on Tuesday. In Gauteng province — South Africa’s most populous, with 16 million people, including the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria — the decrease started earlier and has continued.
After 16,000 new infections on December 12, the province’s numbers have steadily dropped, to just over 3,300 cases Tuesday.
Senior researcher at the University of Witwatersrand’s Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Department, Marta Nunes, says “The drop in new cases nationally, combined with the sustained drop in new cases seen here in Gauteng province, which for weeks has been the center of this wave, indicates that we are past the peak,”
“It was a short wave … and the good news is that it was not very severe in terms of hospitalizations and deaths,” she said. It is “not unexpected in epidemiology that a very steep increase, like what we saw in November, is followed by a steep decrease.”
In another sign that the surge may be receding, a study of healthcare professionals who tested positive for the coronavirus at Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital in Soweto shows a rapid increase and then a quick decline in cases.
“Two weeks ago we were seeing more than 20 new cases per day, and now it is about five or six cases per day,” Nunes said.
However Veronica Uekermann, head of the COVID-19 response team at Steve Biko Academic Hospital, cautions that it is still very early, and there are several factors that must be closely watched.
Daily case counts can be affected by many external factors including uneven testing, reporting delays and other fluctuations, including people movement during the holiday season and the general behavior during this period.
Uekermann notes that infections spiked last year after the holiday break.
It’s also summertime in South Africa, and many gatherings are outdoors, which may make a difference between the Omicron-driven wave here and the surges in Europe and North America, where people tend to gather indoors in the Northern Hemisphere winter.
The Omicron strain was first detected in South Africa in mid November and, according to the World Health Organisation has now spread to 89 countries. It has rapidly become the dominant strain in many countries, including the USA, UK and Australia.
Despite the higher than usual rate of infection, the variant has caused only a modest uptick in hospitalisations and has contributed to only a small number of deaths.
Source – The Los Angeles Times.