Western Cape Premier Alan Winde announced that one of the latest in the province’s total of 310 positive cases was identified in the sprawling township of Khayelitsha.
The province’s last confirmed tally was 271.
In Gauteng, cases rose from 533 to 545, and include six healthcare workers, according to Health MEC Bandile Masuku.
The Department of Health said on its dedicated Covid-19 portal https://sacoronavirus.co.za/, that it ‘noted with concern a number of confirmed COVID-19 cases of health workers who work both in the private and public hospitals. This includes doctor and nurses. We mention this because health workers are in the frontline of this battle. They are exposed not only to their families but to the patients who they are meant to treat.’
It also said that South Africa had ‘very limited stock of flu vaccines’. The vaccines were ‘pre ordered a year in advance’, and when the country’s public and private institutions placed their last orders, ‘we had not anticipated this COVID-19 pandemic’, which meant that, ‘as it stands, our flu vaccines are understocked’.
Health workers would be prioritised as recipients of the existing stock.
The department also announced that a top-level South African team headed by Professor Helen Rees and Professor Jeremy Nel, and including 30 senior academics, researchers and clinicians from eight medical schools in the country, was participating in a clinical trial ‘to find effective treatment for Covid-19’.
The global project had been convened by the World Health Organisation. The treatment options being included in the clinical trial were Remdesivir, a drug previously used in an Ebola trial; Lopinavir/ritonavir, a licensed treatment for HIV/AIDS; Lopinavir/ritonavir with interferon beta-1a, used for multiple sclerosis; and Chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine, used to treat malaria and rheumatology
Other countries that have already confirmed their participation in the trial are Argentina, Bahrain, Canada, France, Iran, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and Thailand.
In other virus-related news
- The BBC reported that Italy recorded a further 756 new deaths on Sunday, bringing the total there to almost 11 000, the highest in the world. But this also marked the second successive fall in the daily number of recorded deaths.There were 889 on Saturday and more than 900 on Friday. While the number of people testing positive rose yesterday to 97 689 from 92 472, this is the lowest daily rise in new cases since Wednesday;
- More than 3.38 billion people worldwide have been asked or ordered to follow confinement measures in the fight against Covid-19, according to AFP;
- New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reported 7 195 new Covid-19 cases across the state, bringing the total of New York cases to 59 513, just under half the total cases across the country, according to the BBC. As of Sunday, 965 death were linked to the virus across the state. Cuomo said nursing homes made up one quarter of the deaths;
- King Felipe of Spain’s cousin Princess Maria Teresa de Borbón-Parma is the first member of a royal family to die from Covid-19;
- Tokyo Olympics organisers are eyeing next July as a start date for the postponed Games, according to Japanese news reports; and
- Thomas Schaefer, the finance minister of Germany’s Hesse state, committed suicide apparently after becoming ‘deeply worried’ over how to cope with the economic fallout from the coronavirus, state premier Volker Bouffier was reported to have said yesterday.