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While it is too early to draw definitive conclusions about the coronavirus outbreak that affected our coasts, President Cyril Ramaphosa said Thursday that evidence showed that the blockade is working to delay its spread.
Ramaphosa announced a two-week extension to the national close, which was due to end on April 16, during a televised speech from the Union Buildings in Pretoria.
The restrictions will continue until April 30.
“Since the blockade went into effect, the rate at which new cases have been identified here in South Africa has slowed significantly. Since 1,170 cases confirmed on March 27, the number of cases confirmed today is 1,934,” he said. .
Eighteen people have died, according to the Health Department.
This represented an average increase in daily cases of around 42% before the blockade, but since the restrictions were implemented, this has dropped to around 4%, Ramaphosa said.
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“While we recognize the need to scale up the tests to get a better picture of the infection rate, this represents real progress,” he added.
Ramaphosa also thanked the country for the great efforts made in the last days and weeks and announced new comprehensive measures that will be carried out in the coming weeks, including a significant increase in tests, as well as economic and social support packages.
Further:
– The president, his deputy, all the ministers, his deputies and the provincial prime ministers will receive a salary reduction of a third of their salaries, which will be donated to the Solidarity Fund.
– The National Fan Project will mobilize resources from the public and private sectors to manufacture non-invasive fans.
– A comprehensive economic recovery plan is being prepared, with certain sectors of the economy ready to return to operations during the “second shutdown”.
The current blocking rules would remain in place and Ramaphosa urged adherence to the rules.
“Unless we take these tough steps now, unless we stay this course for a little while longer, the coronavirus pandemic will engulf and eventually consume our country. We all want the economy to come back to life, we want people to come back. To work, we want our children to go back to school, and we all want to be able to move freely again, “he said.
“But our immediate priority must continue to be halting the spread of the virus and preventing massive loss of life.”
The worst to come
A senior official at the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD), Professor Cheryl Cohen, told News24 in an interview prior to Ramaphosa’s speech that strict blockade measures had slowed the spread of Covid-19, But the worst was yet to come when winter was fast approaching. .
Cohen, co-director of the NICD’s Center for Respiratory Diseases and Meningitis and an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of the Witwatersrand, who is a crucial figure in the fight against the virus, spoke to News24 in an extensive interview Thursday. .
Cohen said the current slowdown in new daily infection numbers was due to the travel ban imposed by Ramaphosa, which halted importation of cases from countries where the spread of the coronavirus was already exponential.
The blockade, in effect, gave the country time to prepare and deploy massive testing campaigns, he added, which were aimed at identifying cases in communities, finding infection hot spots and taking steps to prevent further spread in those areas.
If a larger outbreak were to occur, Cohen hoped it would affect wealthier and less wealthy citizens alike, saying the concern was that the impact would be greater in communities living in overcrowded conditions.
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The effect of the blockade has been to slow the spread of the virus, but said he knew and accepted that there was local transmission (people infecting others) in the country, and that many of the cases had not yet been identified.
“We hope that the cases can arise. It is also accepted that the number of cases we see reported is not all cases. Nobody says they are all cases in SA.”
“The epidemic is, in a sense, evolving. What we saw at the beginning, with the exponential increases in numbers, the vast majority of that was the importation of cases and reflected, in fact, the exponential growth in other parts of the world that are ahead of us on the curve. ”
Since the blockade was implemented, the number of confirmed daily cases has been reduced to between 20 and 90 per day.
With winter fast approaching, Cohen said, it would be even more difficult to find cases of Covid-19 among the tens of thousands of people who contract other respiratory diseases each year, adding that the government responded to this challenge by implementing massive tests and exams.
The virus, he added, was to be with us for the foreseeable future, until a vaccine was found.
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