Day: December 6, 2021

Some South Africa hospital wards are jammed with patients infected with the omicron coronavirus variant as President Cyril Ramaphosa urged South Africans on Monday to get vaccinated.

In the past week, cases have reached more than 16,000, up dramatically from 2,300 last Monday, according to South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

The NICD says the increase in cases in such a short period of time is “unprecedented” in the trajectory of the pandemic, now in its fourth phase in the country.

“Unfortunately, we’re seeing a more than doubling of hospital admissions each day,” said Ian Sanne, an infectious diseases specialist who serves on South Africa’s COVID-19 presidential advisory committee.

Sanne is advising hospitals to prepare for “significant surges” of patients in the coming weeks and months, and to make sure they have plenty of oxygen.

Dr. Fareed Abdullah, who heads the South African Medical Research Council, says the surges are already happening in Johannesburg and Tshwane.

Hospitals in South Africa’s Gauteng province, which contains two of the country’s biggest cities, are packed with people infected with the omicron variant. Doctors say most of the patients haven’t been vaccinated, and an alarming number of them are children under the age of five-years-old.

“There’s been a rather rapid rise in hospital admissions with patients who have COVID, whether they’re presenting with COVID pneumonia or severe COVID disease,” Dr. Abdullah said.

“All of the hospitals in Tshwane are seeing an upsurge, and the COVID bed occupancy is increasing 30% to 40% per day, over the last few days,” he said.

Some 36% of South Africans are fully vaccinated and President Ramaphosa on Monday urged citizens to get the shots.

“South Africa now has sufficient supplies of vaccines, … vaccination is essential for our economic recovery because as more people are vaccinated more areas of economic activity will be opened up,” he said.

The president also announced that that the National Coronavirus Command Council would soon meet to discuss further measures. Authorities are considering making vaccines mandatory in some parts of society.

Unvaccinated people are particularly susceptible to omicron, as are individuals who have not been exposed to COVID-19 before, disease specialist Sanne said.

“At this time, we think about 75% to 80% of hospitalizations are unvaccinated,” he said. “It could be as large as 40% of the population that has not yet either been vaccinated or had a previous infection with coronavirus up until now,” he noted. “So, we have a large pool of people who can still present with overwhelming infection and severe disease,” he said.

Since detection of the variant was first announced in southern Africa last month, scientists have been hoping that most cases would be mild.

Health authorities say omicron is re-infecting some people who have been vaccinated, but mostly their symptoms are not severe.

One of the country’s top epidemiologists, Salim Abdool Karim, told VOA that current vaccines should provide “good protection” against omicron.

Another disease expert, Shabir Madhi, noted, however, that the longer viruses flourish in populations, the more likely they are to mutate into variants.

“Without any question, if we were to vaccinate more people, we’d be able to dampen the amount of virus that would be circulating,” Madhi said. “We’re not going to eliminate this virus, by any stretch of the imagination.

“But we can reduce the amount of virus that’s circulating and most importantly, vaccines are going to be much more foolproof when it comes to protecting against severe diseases, than taking your chances without being vaccinated,” Madhi said.

Disease specialist Sanne said that COVID-19’s going to be around for a “long time” to come, and those who believe the disease will eventually “just fizzle out,” are wrong.

“We don’t have the ability to predict that this virus as a virus becomes weaker, whereas we do in fact see that the immune system will improve with time to in fact deal with the infection,” he said.

Source: Voice of America

Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim, a former anti-apartheid fighter who, like the greats of the struggle he encountered, spent part of his life in Robben Island penitentiary in South Africa, died Monday at the age of 84.

He died of a long illness at his home in Johannesburg, the ruling African National Congress said in a statement.

The party hailed “a longtime ANC member, a patriot who has served his country in many capacities with humility, dedication and distinction.”

Born on July 1, 1937, the activist of Indian origin had a journey similar to that of the big names in the fight against the white racist regime in South Africa.

Switched from nonviolent protest to armed struggle under apartheid, he was arrested in 1963 for sabotage and sent to Robben Island for 15 years. He was released in 1979.

At the end of the 1980s, when he joined the ANC in exile and multiplied the missions, he was kidnapped by apartheid agents in neighboring Swaziland (now Eswatini), tortured, then sentenced for “treason” and sent back to Robben Island.

In prison, he studied with Nelson Mandela and shared a cell with Jacob Zuma, who like Mandela was a future president of South Africa.

Ebrahim was finally free in 1991. The first multiparty elections were held in South Africa three years later.

He joined the government in 2009 as deputy foreign minister, a post he held for six years.

“I am saddened by the death of a comrade and distinguished advisor who has dedicated his life to the liberation of our country and the resolution of conflicts in the world,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a statement, welcoming a “sweet revolutionary.”

Source: Voice of America

Inter-communal clashes between Arabs and non-Arabs left at least 30 people dead and 40 others injured in Sudan’s West Darfur state on Sunday, according to eyewitnesses and officials.

Local militia supported by a paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, attacked internally displaced persons in Kreinik camp and torched their houses, witnesses said.

The latest wave of fighting, which has been going on for weeks, stemmed from a dispute late Saturday between a customer and the owner of a cell phone store who was shot dead.

Arab fighters known as Janjaweed attacked the camp early Sunday morning after the murder.

Thirty bodies were brought to Kreinik Hospital and more than 40 others who were wounded were treated there, Mustafa Mohammed Zain, a medical assistant at Kirenik Hospital, told VOA’s South Sudan in Focus on Monday.

“Up to now we are still receiving wounded people even though the fighting stopped at around five a.m. this morning,” he said. “Some of them are in critical condition and some might die within the coming one or two hours.”

The hospital lacks basic medical equipment and does not have enough medical workers to respond to the wounded, Zain said. He called on state and national health authorities to urgently intervene.

“This is a big, rural hospital and it cannot be managed only by medical officers,” Zain said. “The government is supposed to send us doctors to help the situation.”

The hospital has run out of supplies like gauze and cotton, Zain said.

“We used all the reserve stock,” he said. “Medical workers are not safe and cannot go to the nearest location to get more medical supplies.”

The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Sudan said an estimated 4,300 people have been displaced from the Jebel Moon area of West Darfur state in the last week due to fighting.

Mohammed Issa Alieu, the acting regional governor for Darfur, last week called the humanitarian situation in Jebel Moon “horrific” and appealed to aid agencies to quickly intervene.

Thousands of displaced families have fled to eastern Chad and are exposed to bad weather, Alieu said.

Adam Rijal, spokesman for the General Coordination for Refugees and Displaced in Darfur, a local advocacy group for IDP’s, told South Sudan in Focus that some political leaders in Sudan’s transitional government are behind what he calls “systematic” attacks on indigenous civilians in Darfur.

Renewed clashes erupted between different groups across the Darfur region shortly after the joint United Nations and African Union peacekeeping mission ended its mandate a year ago.

Rijal blames the United Nations Security Council for what he calls a unilateral decision to withdraw from the area without consulting the affected population in Darfur.

“We are supposed to have a voice on this decision because we are the ones facing the pain of the situation more than any other people,” he said.

Despite a peace agreement signed between the government and armed groups in Darfur more than a year ago, the area has seen repeated clashes between different ethnic communities.

A land dispute last month between communities in the Jebel Moon area led to clashes that left at least 17 people dead.

Under the Juba Peace Agreement, various forces were supposed to deploy a 12,000-strong presence in Darfur within 90 days to secure the area and provide protection for civilians.

Source: Voice of America