Despite President Cyril Ramaphosa announcing during his “family meeting” on Tuesday night that almost 2 million people have been vaccinated against the coronavirus in the country and the pace of vaccinations is steadily increasing, there are still concerns and questions. Can we achieve herd immunity and when?
This week, World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the media the virus was moving faster than the global distribution of vaccines.
South Africa is still busy with phase 2 of the roll-out, vaccinating healthcare workers and people 60 and over. The vaccination of teachers was scheduled to start last week but was delayed after a batch of 2 million Johnson & Johnson vaccines had to be destroyed due to contamination.
Ramaphosa assured the country the problems with the J&J vaccine had been resolved, with global pharmaceutical company Aspen promising to ramp-up the production and delivery of Covid vaccines within the next few days. This so that teachers could also begin receiving their jabs. Further, he said, by the end of June, South Africa was expected to have received a total of 3.1 million Pfizer doses. Seeing is believing, Sir.
Ghebreyesus said only 2.8% of Africa’s population has been inoculated, compared with a global average of 14.5%. As a result of the rising infections, the country has now returned to lockdown level 3.
According to the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, Gauteng accounts for more than two-thirds of the cases recorded across South Africa. The province with the next-highest number of cases is the Western Cape followed by the Northern Cape and then KwaZulu-Natal.
And amid a third wave, the Department of Basic Education has said learners were safer at schools with safety measures in place than where there was no control or supervision.
The Department of Health should lean more on the private health sector so that more health professionals, particularly pharmacists, can be allowed to administer the vaccine. This would ease the burden on the public health sector and increase the vaccination rate so that herd immunity could seem more attainable.
The Star