South Africa’s apparent fall in new COVID-19 cases in the last few days may indicate that the country’s dramatic Omicron-driven surge has passed its peak, medical experts assert. Day-to-day virus case records are uncertain, as they can be influenced by irregular testing, documenting holdups, and other instabilities. But they are proposing one tantalizing indication that Omicron illnesses may subside shortly after a vicious spike. South Africa has been at the lead of the Omicron tide and the world is attending to any indications of how it may play out there to attempt to comprehend what may be in store. After achieving approximately 27,000 new cases nationwide on December 16, the digits declined to about 15,424 on December 21. In Gauteng province — South Africa’s most populous with 16 million people, comprising the hugest city, Johannesburg, and the capital, Pretoria — the decline started faster and has proceeded.
Marta Nunes, senior researcher at the Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics department of the University of Witwatersrand, notified “The drop in new cases nationally combined with the sustained drop in new cases seen here in Gauteng province, which for weeks has been the center of this wave, indicates that we are past the peak.” She also added, “It was a shortwave … and the good news is that it was not very severe in terms of hospitalizations and deaths.” It is not surprising in epidemiology that a very abrupt improvement, like what we saw in November, is attended by an abrupt decline. Gauteng province saw its volumes rising in mid-November. Scientists working out genetic sequencing shortly observed the recent, highly mutated omicron variant that was declared to the world on November 25. Considerably more communicable, omicron rapidly attained authority in South Africa. An approximate 90% of COVID-19 cases in Gauteng province since mid-November have been omicron.
