The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that there will be no return to ‘normal’ life for the ‘foreseeable future’, and people will need to sustain anti-coronavirus measures or else the pandemic will worsen.
But WHO director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said ‘too many countries (were) headed in the wrong direction’. This followed a daily record of 230 000 new cases being reported to the WHO on Sunday.
He told a briefing in Geneva that ‘mixed messages from leaders’ were undermining public trust in initiatives aimed at bringing the pandemic under control.
‘The virus remains public enemy number one, but the actions of many governments and people do not reflect this.’
Measures such as social distancing, hand washing, and wearing masks needed to be taken seriously, he said, as there would be ‘no return to the old normal for the foreseeable future’.
He warned: ‘If the basics aren’t followed, there is only one way this pandemic is going to go. It’s going to get worse and worse and worse.’
Tedros said the epicentre of the virus remained the Americas.
AFP reported that the novel coronavirus had killed nearly 570 000 people and infected more than 12.9 million since the outbreak emerged in China last December.
With around 500 infections an hour, South Africa had to keep up social distancing and learn to observe lockdown measures if vulnerable people were to be kept safe, Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said.
‘I want to stress that this is really a fight against Covid-19. We are number 25 in terms of population size [but] we are number 10 in the number of infections. We have to do everything to protect this beautiful nation of ours,’ she said.
Positive cases in South Africa rose by 11 554 to a cumulative total of 287 796 (with 138 241 recoveries). Gauteng now accounts for 36% of national cases (103 713), followed by the Western Cape (79 344 or 27.6%) and the Eastern Cape (52 058 or 18.1%).
Deaths rose by 93 – 37 in the Western Cape, 23 in the Eastern Cape, 16 in the Free State, 11 in Mpumalanga and 6 in KwaZulu-Natal – to 4 172.
Dlamini-Zuma said: ‘This disease knows no class, no gender, no race, no social status – no one is safe until we are all safe. We are at war with an invisible enemy – we are the ones that move it around.’
Minister of Social Development Lindiwe Zulu highlighted the hunger crisis arising from the lockdown, saying that South Africa was ‘looking the Covid-19 storm in the eye, but there’s another storm of hunger’.
Hunger hotspots were in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Northern Cape and Mpumalanga.
‘We need to respond as quickly as we possibly can, we need to be agile. The storm is here and there isn’t time,’ she said.