[imagesource: Ander Gillenea / AFP]

Today is the 153rd day of our national lockdown.

Despite another round of panic, which started with a voicenote and ended with South Africans queueing outside of liquor stores, the ban on the sale of booze has not yet returned.

That’s good news, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the real battle is ensuring that South Africa’s COVID-19 numbers remain under control, with health minister Zweli Mkhize saying earlier in the week that we’re now plateauing.

Prof Salim Abdool Karim, the chairperson of the COVID-19 Ministerial Advisory Committee, has previously warned about a so-called ‘second surge’, and even sounded the alarm again on Monday, but he now seems more cautiously optimistic.

In an interview with eNCA yesterday, Prof Karim said they’re not expecting any major spikes, but did warn that South Africa needs to get to less than a thousand cases per day before we can claim any sort of victory against the virus.

The latest stats released last night showed 1 567 new COVID-19 cases, and 149 deaths, in the previous 24 hours.

More from that interview:

“When we look at the overall trend, we can see quite clearly that the downward trend is in all provinces and is pretty consistent,” Karim said…

“We’re still at the high end… but that downward trend — if it holds — will enable us to get to the kind of level we need to get to.”

…”Right now I’m not yet saying that we’re in the clear because we need to have about ten days after we have eased our restrictions.

“When we look at the data in the next few days, we’ll get a sense of whether the easing of the restrictions have lead to an uptick in the number of cases.”

Once that data is in, we will have a better picture of how the easing of restrictions has affected the spread of the virus, and what measures, if any, will need to be adjusted going forward.

According to BusinessTech, Prof Karim also touched on the issue of re-infection:

Karim said that there has been a ‘clear cut’ case of re-infection in Hong Kong where a man reported having the coronavirus nearly five months after first being treated for it…

“He had two different strains of the virus, that’s why we are quite confident it is case of re-infection. Now what we don’t know yet is whether this happening much more commonly and we just don’t know about it,” Karim said.

The professor said there is uncertainty as to whether the first infection alters the chemical spectrum of the second infection – meaning the second infection is much more mild.

Watch that segment of Prof Karim’s interview below:

[sources:enca&bustech]