South Africa’s COVID-19 death toll has crossed the 80 000 mark, after 516 more people succumbed to the respiratory disease on Wednesday.

According to the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), this means COVID-19 has claimed 80 469 lives to date.

Meanwhile, there are 13 251 more people who were confirmed to have contracted the virus in the last 24 hours, pushing the laboratory-confirmed cases to 2 722 202.

According to the public health institute, KwaZulu-Natal recorded most infections after 3 627 people tested positive.

The province is followed by the Western Cape, which accounted for 3 338 new infections, 1 783 in the Eastern Cape, and 1 317 in Gauteng.

The NICD said the latest daily increase represents a 20% positivity rate even though the seven-day moving average daily number of cases has decreased.

Meanwhile, there has been an increase of 606 hospital admissions in the past 24 hours.

The information is based on 16 162 825 tests, of which 66 244 were performed since the last reporting cycle.

In addition, 268 712 COVID-19 doses were administered on Wednesday, pushing the tally to 11 363 810.

The latest data show that Gauteng, Western Cape, and Limpopo distributed the most jabs.

According to the Department of Health, 143 313 people were fully vaccinated in the past 24 hours.

As of 25 August, there have been 213 050 725 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 4 448 352 deaths, reported to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Global view

With over 4.5 million new cases reported between 16 and 22 August, the WHO said the number of new cases reported globally seems to be stable after increasing for nearly two months since mid-June.

Meanwhile, the regions of Western Pacific and Americas continue to report increases in new infections, with increases of 20% and 8% respectively as compared to last week.

“The South-East Asia and Eastern Mediterranean regions reported decreases in weekly incidence of 16% and 10% respectively,” the organisation said, adding that the European and African regions reported case incidence rates similar to those reported last week.

In addition, the number of deaths reported globally this week remains similar to last week, with over 68 000 new fatalities reported.

Two regions including Europe and the Americas reported a peak in new deaths of 11% and 10% respectively, while there was a decrease in the African and South-East Asia regions.

“The cumulative number of cases reported globally is now over 211 million and the cumulative number of deaths is just over 4.4 million.”

The highest numbers of new cases were reported from the United States (1 020 072 new cases, 15% increase), Iran (251 610 new cases, 7% decrease), India (231 658 new cases, 10% decrease), the United Kingdom (219 919 new cases, 11% increase), and Brazil (209 099 new cases, 1% decrease).

Globally, cases of the Alpha variant have been reported in 192 countries, 141 countries have cases of the Beta variant, 86 have reported the Gamma variant, while 163 have the Delta variant.

Source: South African Government News Agency