Mkhize: SA govt mulling further restrictions amid India’s record-breaking cases, deaths

The warning comes in spite of indications that the number of infections have stopped rising dramatically. 

On Thursday Mkhize reported an increase of 1086 new cases, bringing the tally up to 1 579 536. 

There have been 1 504 426 recoveries, making the recovery rate 95%. 

The 24 hours leading up to the latest report saw 46 new deaths to take the total number of fatalities to 54 331 deaths. 

Gauteng, Eastern Cape and Free State reported the highest number of fatalities.  

Mkhize joined hands with other health officials on Thursday evening to reiterate the need to vaccinate citizens in a bid to stave off high infection numbers. 

“With the vaccines, even if we are successful and we meet the targets, we still need to use our masks, we still need to wash hands and sanitisers, we need to keep distancing, we need to avoid overcrowding, we need to avoid wild parties where the control is very poor,” he told a Netwerk24 event.

“That is very important because it will be a long time before we say we are all safe so there’s not going to be a situation when we say because you are vaccinated, you can go party in a wild way. We can’t do that,” he added. 

“The whole world looked and wondered at South Africa when we went through a terrible wave and we didn’t have the vaccines, but we were able to enforce such conduct to reduce the impact.” 

He admitted government is in talks about further restrictions. 

This comes after India reported a record-breaking wave of Covid-19 cases and deaths. 

“The challenges that we’ve seen in India are very serious. We’ve got right now an advisory from the ministerial advisory committee to suggest that we need to consider some restrictions and we are going through that processing. 

“The main issue for us is that the new variant in India is found in many other countries, the variant in South Africa is found in many other countries, you can never ultimately control only on the basis of restricting movement internationally but what we’re saying is that where we are, we are not out of the woods,” Mkhize warned.  

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