By Mogomotsi Magome
Associated Press
South Africa is experiencing a rapid rise in coronavirus cases, fueled by a new omicron sub-variant dubbed
BA.4
, according to health experts in that country.
Infections had decreased since February, and are now growing strongly again since last week, according to Salim Abdool Karim, a former adviser to the local government in its response to the pandemic.
So far there has only been a slight increase in hospitalizations and no increase in deaths, said this public health expert from the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
A woman wearing a face mask walks past a mural of former South African President Nelson Mandela, in Katlehong, east of Johannesburg, on Friday, April 29, 2022.Themba Hadebe/AP
South Africa is recording just over 6,000 COVID-19 cases a day, up from just a few hundred a day a few weeks ago.
The proportion of positive tests went from 4% in mid-April to 19% on Thursday, according to official figures.
Monitoring of sewage has also shown an increase in the spread of the virus.
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The new strain appears to be rapidly gaining ground on the original omicron variant and other versions of the virus, but Karim believes "it's too early to tell if it will cause a big wave" of infections.
Even so, this increase in cases causes concern because it was precisely in South Africa that omicron was first recorded before it spread throughout the world.
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There is a worrying trend, said Helen Rees, director of the Institute for Reproductive Health and HIV at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg: Children are the first to end up in hospitals, just as they were during the omicron wave.
Experts say that BA.4 appears to be more transmissible than the original and later variant, BA.2.
Scientists are still studying this new strain, but BA.4 does not appear to cause more severe illness than other versions of the virus, the World Health Organization said in a recent report.
In South Africa, gatherings for the Easter and Ramadan holidays, as well as flooding in the coastal city of Durban, may have contributed to the current surge, Abdool Karim said.
The BA.4 has appeared in other countries, but it's not clear if "it's going to become a dominant variant globally," he said.
So far, it has not been recorded in the United States, where the BA.2 subvariant remains dominant and its descendant, BA.2.12.1, is gaining ground.
The latter is believed to spread more rapidly than the former and has caused about 29% of cases in the US in the past week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
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Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University, said the two variants are spreading in different populations, and that he knows of no data "to support a direct comparison."
Since the start of the pandemic, South Africa has seen the largest share of COVID-19 cases in Africa.
Although the country's 60 million people make up less than 5% of Africa's population of 1.3 billion, South Africa has recorded more than a quarter of the continent's 11.4 million recorded cases and nearly half of Africa's 252,000 deaths.
Experts say this may be because it has a more developed public health system and keeps better records of hospitalizations and deaths than other African countries.
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More than 44% of adult South Africans are vaccinated against the disease, according to official statistics Benido Impouma, a WHO Africa official, said the latest rise "shows that people must remain vigilant and continue to comply with public safety measures." , such as the use of masks, hand washing and social distance.
