‘A festive Christmas still possible’ - Dhlomo
The South African government is still hoping for a more festive Christmas this year.
This after the country celebrated several dark holidays amid growing Covid-19 infections.
Despite fears of another resurgence of infections at the end of the year, Deputy Health Minister Sibongiseni Dhlomo believes the country’s vaccination pace puts government at good stead to ease restrictions.
Dhlomo made the comments on Friday.
“We are successfully doing 215 000 vaccinations per day and the president wants us to go to 300 000, which we actually accept and we should push.
“We are left with 16 weeks to get to the 16th of December so we are hopefully can inject 16 million vaccines and if we can do that successfully or do that better, we will probably have a good Christmas,” he added.
Government hopes to vaccinate close to 70% of the country’s population by the end of the year.
So far, more than 14 million jabs have been administered with over 7 million adults fully vaccinated.
“Can we motivate one another to do better and faster so that come December we can be able to get the Department of Health telling us better statistics and maybe indicating opening up of our festive season,” Dhlomo said.
But he warned it wasn’t set in stone.
“In fact we are very scared that come March next year it will be the third Easter weekend where we are to able to tell our religious people to go and celebrate in big numbers,” he warned.
Listen to Dhlomo below:
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