Karim warns of Covid-19 resurgence

There are promising signs that the worst of SA’s coronavirus crisis is over, but the country still risks a second wave of the disease if prevention measures falter, health minister Zweli Mkhize’s top coronavirus adviser warned on Thursday.

The comments by Salim Abdool Karim come as the government weighs up further relaxation of SA’s lockdown rules including the removal of bans on the sale of alcohol and cigarettes.

SA has the fifth-highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases. By Wednesday, SA’s tally had topped 568,000 recorded cases and the official death toll had climbed past 11,000. The sevenday rolling average of new cases, the number of hospital admissions, and weekly deaths were all falling, suggesting the epidemic was slowing, said Karim, who chairs Mkhize’s ministerial advisory committee on Covid.

But countries that had brought initial outbreaks under control were now seeing a resurgence of Covid-19, he said. “We are particularly concerned about a second wave. We need to be very careful. This is not a time for complacency,” he said in a seminar hosted by the University of the Free State.

“We have to look at this not as a sprint but as a marathon. Even if we get a vaccine, it is unlikely we will be able to vaccinate a substantial part of the population before the end of the year,” said Karim. The “new normal” needed to focus on averting the spread of Covid-19 and reducing the risk of outbreaks, he said.

China, Spain and Australia are among the countries that have seen a resurgence of the disease after relaxing their lockdowns. They have been forced to reimpose restrictions in areas where there have been flareups. Though SA’s risk-adjusted strategy for managing Covid-19 implies a differentiated lockdown approach for different areas, depending on the prevalence of the coronavirus, so far the country has opted for a national approach.

Medical Research Council (MRC) president Glenda Gray said the recent fall in death rates, detailed in the MRC’s latest weekly mortality report, provided the first evidence that the course of the epidemic was changing. “Obviously we have to be careful. All of us are mindful that we could have a second wave,” she said.

It was vital that South Africans continue with nonpharmaceutical interventions, such as avoiding crowds and wearing masks, to prevent the spread of Covid-19, she said.

The MRC’s latest mortality report, released on Wednesday, shows that after three months of steadily rising weekly death tolls, the number of fatalities fell for the second week running.

Weekly all-cause mortality fell 10.6% between the week starting July 15 and the week of July 29, due largely to a fall in deaths from natural causes, which include those from Covid-19. Natural deaths — those caused by infectious diseases or conditions such as cancer and diabetes — fell from a high of 15,524 in the week beginning July 15 to 14,497 in the week of July 22, and continued to fall to 13,798 in the week of July 29, a drop of 11.1%.