Covid vaccine drive is running out of steam

Daily Covid vaccinations in South Africa have more or less plateaued since July.

At the peak of the vaccination drive, up to 240 000 vaccine doses were being administered daily. This has dropped to just over 5 000 a day. Less than half of these are first doses and a third are booster shots.

Half the adult population is currently vaccinated. Among adults 60 years or older, nearly 73% have been fully vaccinated.

The government’s dedicated coronavirus website has a list of “active vaccination sites”, many of which are no longer active, and the “Find My Jab” page has different information.

People are still getting Covid. About 2 000 new cases are reported each week, but according to the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, only 16% of cases are being detected. Testing sites are also few and far between.

Official daily deaths and hospitalisation rates are low in relation to previous waves. In the past four weeks, 125 deaths from Covid were reported. The real number is likely much more than this.

A weekly report published by the Medical Research Council and the University of Cape Town calculates the number of excess deaths – deaths above the historical average before Covid – at almost 50 000 so far this year.

While in earlier waves the researchers were able to estimate that 85% to 95% of these excess deaths were due to Covid, the changing nature of the epidemic has made it harder to estimate how many excess deaths were due to Covid.

More than 85% of Covid infections in the country are from the omicron BA.5 variant, which is widespread and infectious, but usually causes very mild illness.

Dr Nicholas Crisp, deputy director-general of the national department of health, is the coordinator of the national vaccination drive. He agrees the current status of the vaccination drive is “very disappointing”.

The vaccination programme is being integrated into primary healthcare and to monitor and manage the pandemic, the government is continuing with daily testing, gene sequencing and wastewater sampling.

Future variants of the virus could be more dangerous.

“As long as there is transmission, there is going to be mutation,” Professor Glenda Gray told GroundUp.

How the virus mutates in the future is yet to be seen.