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The president of South Africa has reimposed a ban on the sale of alcohol and ordered the closure of all bars as part of new restrictions to help the country fight the resurgence of the coronavirus, including a new variant.
In a national speech on Monday, Cyril Ramaphosa also announced the closure of all public beaches and swimming pools in the country’s hot spots of infection, which include Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and several coastal areas.
In addition, South Africa is extending its nightly curfew by four hours, requiring all residents to be home from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., the president said.
Reckless behavior due to alcohol intoxication has contributed to increased transmission. Alcohol-related accidents and violence are putting pressure on the emergency units at our hospital, ”Ramaphosa said.
“As we had to do in the early days of the lockdown, we now have to flatten the curve to protect the capacity of our healthcare system and enable it to respond effectively to this new wave of infections.”
Ramaphosa said the ban on selling alcohol and other new restrictions would go into effect at midnight Monday. They include the mandatory wearing of masks in public, and anyone who does not wear a mask in a public place will be subject to a fine or a criminal charge punishable by a possible jail term, the president said.
Ramaphosa said the increased restrictions are necessary due to an increase in Covid-19 infections that has caused the total confirmed virus cases in South Africa to exceed one million.
“Almost 27,000 South Africans are known to have died from Covid-19. The number of new coronavirus infections is increasing at an unprecedented rate, “he said. “More than 50,000 new cases have been reported since Christmas Eve.”
Ramaphosa announced the new measures after a cabinet meeting and an emergency meeting of the national coronavirus command council. He said the new restrictions would be reviewed in a few weeks and would only be considered a relaxation when the number of new cases and hospitalizations decreased.
The country surpassed the 1 million mark in confirmed virus cases on Sunday night, when authorities reported that the country’s total cases during the pandemic had reached 1,004,413, including 26,735 deaths.
Like Britain, South Africa is battling a variant of Covid-19 that medical experts believe is more contagious than the original. The variant has become dominant in many parts of the country, according to experts.
The South African Medical Association, which represents nurses and other healthcare workers as well as physicians, warned on Monday that the healthcare system was about to be overwhelmed by the combination of increased numbers of Covid-19 patients and people who need urgent care for alcohol. -related incidents. Many holiday gatherings involve high levels of alcohol consumption, which in turn often leads to an increase in trauma cases.
When South Africa previously had a total ban on the sale of liquor, trauma cases in hospitals fell by as much as 60%, according to government statistics. When the ban on the sale of alcohol was lifted, trauma cases returned to previous levels.
South Africa’s seven-day moving average of daily confirmed cases has risen in the past two weeks from 11.18 new cases per 100,000 people on December 13 to 19.87 new cases per 100,000 people on December 27.
When European Union countries began to implement the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine that was approved by the bloc’s regulators last week, Spain He said he was creating a registry of people who refuse to be vaccinated and will share it with other member countries.
The vaccine will not be compulsory in Spain, but Salvador Illa, the Spanish Minister of Health, told Spanish television that the best way to defeat the virus was to “vaccinate us all, the more the better.”
Eight home workers in Germany They were accidentally injected with five doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, local authorities said Monday, but so far they have not suffered serious ill effects.
The seven women and one man, aged between 38 and 54, are employees of a nursing home in the city of Stralsund, in northeastern Germany.
South Korea said Tuesday it would sign an agreement with Moderna to offer Covid-19 vaccines to 20 million people, the Yonhap news agency reported, citing the presidential office. The nation reported 40 deaths Tuesday, a daily record.
This comes a day after officials promised to accelerate efforts to launch a public vaccination program against the coronavirus, as the country detected its first cases of the virus variant linked to rapidly rising infections in Britain.
