• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

Cape Town emerges as Africa’s Covid-19 hotspot

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One of the world’s great tourist destinations as well as home to some of South Africa’s worst slums, the picturesque city of Cape Town is now fast emerging as an African hotspot for Covid-19.

A surge of infections has placed South Africa on warning that its fight against the pandemic is only just beginning as the continent’s most industrialised economy slowly emerges from a strict lockdown.

An outbreak centred on the city in South Africa’s Western Cape accelerated last week to nearly 14,000 confirmed cases as of Saturday, against just over 8,000 a week before, about two-thirds of the country’s total and more than one in ten of all cases in Africa so far.

It is a sign of how infections may yet pick up pace in a region that is still early to the pandemic, experts said.

The likely spread of the virus from international travellers to supermarkets in lockdown and workers living in the poorest townships of Cape Town “may be an early indication on how the epidemic will progress in other provinces over time,” Zweli Mkhize, the health minister, said last week.

The surge also symbolises a dilemma for President Cyril Ramaphosa, who imposed a draconian lockdown in March that experts say averted an early uncontrolled rise and bought time for Africa’s biggest testing regime to kick in. There have been just over 400 deaths to date. On Sunday Mr Ramaphosa announced a significant loosening of the national lockdown under a phased exit plan from the end of this month, amid pressure over mounting economic distress.

The main opposition Democratic Alliance, which governs the Western Cape, has called to “end the national hard lockdown now”.

But Mr Ramaphosa also declared Cape Town and all other major South African cities as “coronavirus hotspots” requiring intense surveillance, as he warned that the worst of the epidemic is yet to come.

One-third of all South African cases to date have been recorded in the last week and “the risk of a massive increase in infection is now greater” than ever before, Mr Ramaphosa said.

“We are probably a little bit ahead of other parts of the country” and the surge in cases shows that South Africa’s strategy should instead shift from strict lockdowns to targeting local hotspots with intensive testing and quarantining, Alan Winde, the Western Cape’s provincial premier and a DA member, told the Financial Times.