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Health Minister Dr. Zweli Mkhize has announced that there are now 10,015 confirmed cases of coronavirus in South Africa.
This is an increase of 595 from the 9,420 cases reported on Saturday.
Dr. Mkhize said in a statement Sunday (May 10), that the total number of deaths has increased by eight, to 194. A total of 341,336 tests have been performed, compared to 324,079 before.
Globally, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases has exceeded 4.1 million, with more than 280,000 confirmed deaths.
Recoveries have exceeded 1.45 million, leaving around 2.4 million active cases, where 47,000 people are in serious or critical condition.
Latest # COVID-19 statistics in South Africa # day45oflockdown #CovidinSA #StayHomeSA pic.twitter.com/4AqsKool0E
– GCIS media link (@GCISMedia) May 10, 2020
What we don’t know about the coronavirus
The best minds in virology are trying to unravel a mystery: how did a lethal coronavirus leap from the wilderness of rural China to the main centers of human population?
And what chain of genetic mutations produced a pathogen so perfectly suited for stealth and mass transmission?
Deciphering the history of the creation of SARS-CoV-2, as the virus that is now sweeping across the world is known, is a crucial step in stopping a pandemic that killed more than 270,000 and triggered what could be the worst collapse economic since the Great Depression, Bloomberg reported.
While crash vaccine programs are underway in the United States. In the US, Europe and China, an inoculation to avoid the virus may not be ready for months, and the jury is out of possible treatments.
Meanwhile, to reduce the risk of secondary fatal outbreaks or the emergence of an entirely new strain, disease hunters need to retrace the pathogen’s journey around the world.
That means going back to China, where it all started sometime in 2019.
Approximately 70% of emerging infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic or transmitted from animals to people. The sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 genome shows that it is related to two other deadly coronaviruses that originated in bats.
The severe acute respiratory syndrome, which started in China in 2002, and the Middle East respiratory syndrome a decade later spread to humans through a secondary animal source.
In the case of SARS, experts pointed to civet cats (small, elegant nocturnal mammals used in wildlife dishes in China) as the likely conduit. With MERS, camels are believed to be the carriers.
SARS-CoV-2 is presumed to have made a similar journey, but researchers have yet to identify an intermediate animal host, according to Peter Ben Embarek, a food safety and animal disease expert at the WHO.
“We have some kind of missing link in that story between the origin of the virus and when it started circulating in humans,” he said.
That raises the disturbing possibility that an unknown animal source is still spreading the disease, known as Covid-19.
WHO researchers reported Friday that domestic cats can transmit the virus to other cats, although there is still no evidence that pets can transmit it to humans.
What we don’t know about the virus at home
The government says it is withholding some information about the Covid-19 pandemic, to prevent panic.
The Sunday Times reported that the government’s strategy for maintaining crucial public data comes after an earlier model in which the country’s stringent blockade laws were heavily criticized.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesman, Khusela Diko, told the Sunday Times: “We do not want to present these models to the public as if they were the truth of the gospel.
“There is one element where we want to avoid panic in communities, and we are also aware of the stigma of the virus.”
Experts noted that government decisions about reopening the economy are based on information and data that are not available to the public.
The data will include epidemiological models produced by leading scientists, actuaries and mathematicians that track the effectiveness of the blockade, the Sunday newspaper said.
Read: Why is the death toll from coronavirus misleading? And how to get the real numbers
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