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Government interventions, including the travel ban and lockdown, have potentially averted at least 20,000 deaths, says a top scientist.
Professor Tulio de Oliviera, a bioinformatician and director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research and Innovation Sequencing Platform (Krisp) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said the basic reproductive number of the infection had also slowed from three to one in most of the country .
De Oliveira and his team at Krisp have provided real time data analysis of the Covid-19 infection to the government.
He said South Africa had followed the UK trajectory in the early days of the epidemic, but early intervention by the government had seen the two countries charting different paths.
Had they stayed on the same trajectory, De Oliveira estimated at least 20,000 people would have died.
Crucially, he said, the “reproduction number” over time in South Africa, represented as R
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