Most of South Africa’s Covid-19 cases are mild: minister
South Africa has confirmed a total of 3,158 Covid-19 cases, having conducted 114,711 tests to date, health minister, Dr Zweli Mkhize, said on Sunday.
This represented an increase of 124 new cases from before, down from a daily jump of 254, and 178 new cases over the prior 48-hour period leading into the weekend.
Gauteng is still leading with 1,148 people testing positive for the virus, followed by the Western Cape at 868 cases, and KwaZulu-Natal with 617 cases.
Dr Mkhize reported two new Covid-19 related deaths, taking the total death toll to 54 in the country.
The minister noted in a live stream broadcast on Saturday evening, that the majority of coronavirus cases in South Africa are ‘mild’.
“About 80% tend to be mild cases – they don’t need much attention. So many cases do not require medical attention, and can be treated sat home, or not at all,” the minister said.
“But at the moment we’ve got 241 people countrywide who are admitted. One hundred and sixty two of these are admitted to private hospitals. Seventy nine are in public hospitals.”
Dr Mkhize noted that just 36 patients are in ICU, while 23 are on ventilators. The country has 903 recorded recoveries.
Globally, more than 2.4 million people have been infected, while more than 165,000 people have died, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Many Covid-19 trackers calculate the death rate by dividing total deaths by the number of known cases, meaning that currently more than 6% of people infected with the virus have died, globally.
The case fatality rate of Covid-19 differs vastly by country, with Italy and Belgium experiencing high fatality rates in the double digits, currently. South Africa sits at the other end of the spectrum, at around 0.2%.
In March, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated a global mortality rate of 3.4%.
In his opening remarks at the March 3 media briefing on Covid-19, WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: “Globally, about 3.4% of reported Covid-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.”
However, the biggest key to determining the mortality rate of Covid-19, is widespread testing to establish the infection rate, as Dr Mkhize stressed.
Citing virology experts, the New York Times noted that there is no evidence that any strain of the virus, officially known as SARS-CoV-2, has mutated to become more severe in some parts of the world than others, “raising the question of why there appears to be so much variance from country to country”.
Belgian virologist Guido Vanham, the former head of virology at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, said that the cornovirus “will be changing and adapting – that is what happens with the flu and other viruses. A similar thing is likely to happen with this virus”.
“In this epidemic, if it follows the natural course, only a certain proportion of the population will be infected. That proportion could be bigger than in the surrounding countries who took restrictive measures, but in the later-acting countries, after restrictions are lifted, a second wave may come.
“This has been seen in other bacteria or viruses but is something we will only know afterwards – we cannot predict it. This is just the law of evolution, but we don’t yet know the proportion of people not susceptible to this virus. This will depend on the genetic constitution of people and we are all different,” Vanham told the World Economic Forum.
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