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South Africa’s COVID-19 ‘second wave’ was pretty brutal, with the country returning to strict lockdown measures, the sale of alcohol banned, beaches closed, and the number of new deaths and infections spiking through December and January.

Thankfully, the numbers released each night have slowed in the past few weeks, with last night’s update from health minister Dr Zweli Mkhize showing that 2 320 new cases were recorded in 24 hours, along with 165 deaths.

Those new cases were detected from 35 413 tests, meaning our positivity rate is now down below 7%.

We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, though, with experts telling IOL that a third wave is likely “in the cooler months of 2021”:

Professor Saloshni Naidoo, Head of the Department of Public Health Medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said the epidemiology suggests a third wave will occur in June of July of this year, which is SA’s winter season.

“If there are more variants, and if they are more transmissible as we have seen with the 501Y.V2 variant, then the third wave can be more severe than previous waves. While close to 1.5 million South Africans had the infection a large percentage have not and there is the issue of re-infection to consider as well,” Naidoo said.

Dr Aquina Thulare, Health Department Technical Adviser, said a “third resurgence… was inevitable”, with countries throughout Europe and Asia dealing with spikes.

Professor Salim Abdool Karim, the co-chairperson of the Ministerial Advisory Committee (and the guy who went off on CNN about the so-called ‘SA variant’), agreed that a third wave would hit around June or July.

During his State of the Province Address yesterday, Western Cape Premier Alan Winde concurred, saying “we will face another wave of COVID-19 infections in our country”.

Writing for The Daily Maverick, Gilles Van Cutsem, an epidemiologist and Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Research of the University of Cape Town, said that the time to prepare for the third wave is now:

More waves will continue to come as long as there is no access to an effective and affordable vaccine. This is a priority for the national government and the international community. There is no place for vaccine nationalism in a pandemic.

A relatively high level of prevention measures is likely to be needed to delay and/or decrease future waves. Provincial governments and hospitals can reduce mortality by adequately planning sufficient oxygen capacity, human resources and supplies.

Low-cost high-impact strategies include task-shifting basic patient support to enrolled nursing auxiliaries, and other tasks to lay staff; being prepared to hire sufficient numbers of these cadres; and procuring basic supplies such as water bottles, cups, straws, finger oxygen saturation monitors, pillows and bedpans.

I can already see the headlines about provincial governments paying 200 times the price for bedpans and pillows, with the tender awarded to some company registered just days earlier.

Sadly, that’s not even a joke.

Van Cutsem is clearly not confident in our vaccine rollout plan, and you can read the rest of his article here.

For now, all us everyday South Africans can do is keep up our daily preventative measures, and hope for the best.

[sources:iol&dailymav]