In South Africa, the first country to face Omigran, the decline is good

New Year’s Eve received the wind of revenge South Africa. Sadly for the world that has isolated the country after the announcement of Omigron’s discovery on November 25, 2021, South African authorities announced on the evening of December 31 that they would lift the curfew that had been in effect for twenty-one months.

There are only a handful of restrictions on meetings in South Africa, especially as Europe returns to health restrictions in an effort to stem the spread of this highly contagious variant.

The peak of the Omigron wave two weeks ago had officially passed without hospitals being overcrowded, South African officials said before announcing the lifting of the curfew order. Interestingly in the number of infections, the breaking waves began to recede much earlier than the first waves: reaching a peak twice as fast as in the previous episodes.

The logical effect of the high infectivity of the variant is analyzed by virologist Alex Sigal of the African Health Research Institute in Durban, who studies the mutations in the virus and its ability to escape the immune response: “Infections with Omigron increase very rapidly and can only decrease rapidly because they are contagious to everyone at once.” The researcher explains.

The death toll is declining

In the past week, the number of cases in South Africa has dropped by 48%. “Even though this decline is exaggerated due to the declining number of trials [liée aux vacances d’été sud-africaines], The positive rate is also declining, which confirms that we are actually seeing a decline ”,” he said. Says Ridwan Sullivan, a applied mathematician at the Scientific and Industrial Research Council, a South African public research institute. The further test positive rate dropped to 25.8% from 35% last week.

Although the reflux is lower than the number of patients with this condition (6% of those admitted to the hospital last week – compared to the previous week) the number of hospital admissions due to the gap also seems to have peaked. Is traditionally observed between the number of cases and the evolution of the condition of hospitals.

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