Infections with the Omicron variant of Covid in the Western Cape, which is now well into the fourth wave of the Covid pandemic, are spreading extremely rapidly with the reproduction rate at an all-time high, according to the province’s health authorities.
The reproduction rate — the speed with which infections are reproduced — is 2.5, meaning that every 10 active cases of Covid produce another 25 cases, provincial head of health Keith Cloete said during a weekly virtual update on the pandemic hosted by premier Alan Winde.
“The number of active cases are rising exponentially” and the week-on-week increase in cases is at 225%, Cloete said. The positivity rate, or the percentage of tests with a positive result, is 38%, and is nearing the peak of the previous waves. In the past two weeks all cases sequenced were the Omicron variant, he said.
There are about 65 hospital admissions a day, though oxygen use and deaths haven’t increased, Cloete said.
There are an average of 2,000 cases a day based on a seven-day moving average, and the SA Covid-19 Monitoring Consortium predicts this will rise to 3,770 by next week.
Active daily cases are above 1,100 over a seven-day moving average, for the fourth consecutive day, and there are 656 active cases among health workers.
Younger, unvaccinated people are most affected, with some having to be admitted to hospital. Cloete said vaccinations were proving effective among older people in the province as relatively more of them are vaccinated.
The data shows that the lower level of hospitalisations relative to the number of active cases was due to increased immunity to severe disease thanks to vaccination and prior infection, Cloete said.
“The point that we want to stress very strongly is that in an unvaccinated person with no previous infection there is currently no evidence to suggest that Omicron is less severe than any one of the previous variants. We are still seeing some very sick patients,” he said. “We must not jump to conclusions prior to having all the evidence to back that up.”
However, Cloete he said there was sufficient data to show that vaccinations were providing protection against severe disease and that reinfections could occur.
A total of 45.56% of the adult population in the province have been vaccinated.
ensorl@businesslive.co.za
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