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The battle against COVID-19 is far from over.

Sure, most of us are jabbed and double jabbed (with a possible booster thrown in), but winter is coming and so too is an apparent fifth wave.

In early March, Discovery chief executive Adrian Gore spoke about how the company would approach the fifth wave and predicted it would arrive “at the end of April and early May”.

Looks like he was spot on, with The Daily Maverick reporting that “a rise in test positivity rates and the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the country’s wastewater” point to the impending arrival of a fifth wave:

Gauteng is again showing a marked increase in Covid-19 cases, reporting the highest weekly incidence risk (27.4 cases per 100,000 people), followed by the Western Cape (23.4 per 100,000), and KwaZulu-Natal (13.4 per 100,000)…

Health Department spokesperson Foster Mohale said the department has noted the increase in cases with concern.

“Our experts and the NICD are closely monitoring the situation. This is probably driven by subvariants of Omicron. We remind and urge unvaccinated and partly vaccinated people to vaccinate and get booster shots in order to protect themselves,” he said.

The stats released by the NICD last night show the positivity rate ticking past the 16% mark:

#COVID19UPDATE: 19,325 tests were conducted in the last 24hrs, with 3,222 new cases, which represents a 16.7% positivity rate. Today @HealthZA reports 5 deaths; of which 2 occurred in the past 24–48 hrs. Total fatalities are 100,303 to date: Read more here https://t.co/hFnsbIO6uG pic.twitter.com/aoPXYJop5f

— NICD (@nicd_sa) April 24, 2022

However, the number of deaths has not spiked. This is unpacked further by Professor Shabir Madhi:

South Africa on cusp of resurgence, after the high infection rate with Omicron- albeit massive decoupling of infections and severe disease materialising. Current resurgence likely due to sub-lineage of Omicron- BA4. What can we expect, now that >80% population have some immunity

— Shabir Madhi (@ShabirMadh) April 23, 2022

You can read that thread in full here.

Ridhwaan Suliman, a great account to follow on Twitter if you want to keep up to speed with our COVID-19 situation, shows the start of a spike in infections on this graph:

Deja vu 👀
.
.#Gauteng #COVID19 #Rid1TweetsOnCovid pic.twitter.com/lvui8estLY

— Ridhwaan Suliman (@rid1tweets) April 23, 2022

It doesn’t help that there’s a nasty winter flu doing the rounds as well.

Mohale, speaking with EWN, stressed that we should still take certain measures to protect against the spread of COVID-19:

We are still in the pandemic and this pandemic continues to claim lives and we cannot continue to keep on losing lives especially while there is protection and while we can try to protect ourselves with vaccines and other non-pharmaceutical interventions.

We want to remind people that just because the state of disaster has been lifted does not mean that the pandemic is over. So, let’s continue to protect ourselves by doing the right thing and continue to comply with the non-pharmaceutical interventions and if you feel that you need to wear a mask, you can still continue to wear the mask.

Don’t ever downplay the number one additional benefit of indoor mask-wearing – a significant reduction in awkward conversations while shopping.

We’re both going to claim the ‘I didn’t recognise you with a mask on’ excuse and everybody’s a winner.

[sources:dailymav&ewn]