President Ramaphosa could announce new restrictions after breaking the record of 14,000 daily contaminations last week.
Le Monde with AFP
South Africa became the first African country to exceed one million infections on Sunday, December 27, after the latest figures were announced by its Minister of Health.
In full second wave of the pandemic and while a more contagious variant of the coronavirus is responsible for a large majority of new cases, the most affected country on the African continent has officially recorded 1,004,413 positive cases for the coronavirus and 26,735 deaths due to the Covid-19.
Sunday evening, Africa had 2,658,646 cases of contamination and 62,649 deaths, according to the assessment made by AFP from figures provided by the health authorities.
Last week South Africa recorded it averages 11,700 new infections per day, an increase of 39% over the previous week.
Television address
For three consecutive days – Wednesday, Thursday and Friday -, the number of cases exceeded 14,000 per day, an all-time high in the country. On Saturday and Sunday, that number weakened, falling below the thousand mark.
The government is considering imposing new restrictions and President Cyril Ramaphosa could address the country on television this week, as he has been doing this regularly since the start of the pandemic.
In Africa, the second most affected country is Morocco (432,079 cases and 7,240 deaths), followed by Egypt (131,315 cases, 7 352 dead), Tunisia (130,230, 4,426) and Ethiopia (122,413, 1,901).
Africa remains one of the continents least affected by the coronavirus. Europe has more than 25 million infections, the United States and Canada 19.5 million, Latin America and the Caribbean 15 million, Asia 13.7 million and the Middle East nearly 4 million.