South Africa expands use of pop-up clinics
Omicron ‘rapidly becoming dominant variant,’ officials say
South Africa has accelerated its vaccination campaign by giving jabs at pop-up sites in shopping centres and transportation hubs to combat a rapid rise in new COVID-19 cases a week after the discovery of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.
New daily cases nearly doubled to 8,561 Wednesday, from 4,373 a day earlier, according to official statistics. Scientists said they were bracing for the surge to continue.
“We want families to be safe this festive season,” Minister of Health Joe Phaahla said Thursday. “Before you go home, before you leave on vacation, make sure you protect yourself and those you love. If you visit your parents and they have not yet been vaccinated, go with them to your closest vaccination site. It could save their lives.”
Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention director John Nkengasong agreed.
He said during a media briefing that while little is yet known about how effective current vaccines are against Omicron, “anything in your body is better than nothing. We totally don’t have a choice. We have to use vaccines.”
Gauteng province, where South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg, and the capital, Pretoria, are located, is a hot spot of new infections, with more than 70 per cent of the new cases.
Gauteng officials say they were “preparing for the worst” by increasing hospital beds and reopening some field hospitals in anticipation of increased admissions of COVID-19 patients.
Tests indicate the Omicron variant, first reported in southern Africa, is spreading quickly and is now in five of South Africa’s nine provinces. It is not known how many of the new daily cases involve Omicron because scientists can only do full genetic sequencing on a small number of positive tests.
However, it appears Omicron is “rapidly becoming the dominant variant” in South Africa, according to a statement by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases. The institute said that 74 per cent of the 249 samples sequenced in November were identified as Omicron.
Scientists in South Africa and around the world are doing genetic sequencing of Omicron samples to learn more about the variant. Much remains unknown, including whether it is more contagious, as some health authorities suspect, if it makes people more seriously ill or whether existing vaccines are effective against it
The World Health Organization said in a statement that South Africa has confirmed 172 cases of Omicron and Botswana 19. On Thursday Zimbabwe announced that it has confirmed Omicron cases. Ghana and Nigeria in West Africa are the other African countries that have recorded cases of the new variant.