South Africa’s case drop may show omicron peak has passed

A throat swab is taken from a patient to test for COVID-19 at a facility in Soweto, South Africa on December 2. Pic/AP

South Africa's noticeable drop in new COVID-19 cases in recent days may signal that the country's dramatic omicron-driven surge has passed its peak, medical experts say.

Daily virus case counts are notoriously unreliable, as they can be affected by uneven testing, reporting delays and other fluctuations. But they are offering one tantalising hint - far from conclusive yet - that omicron infections may recede quickly after a ferocious spike.

South Africa has been at the forefront of the omicron wave and the world is watching for any signs of how it may play out there to try to understand what may be in store.

After hitting a high of nearly 27,000 new cases nationwide on Thursday, the numbers dropped to about 15,424 on Tuesday. In Gauteng province - South Africa's most populous with 16 million people, including the largest city, Johannesburg, and the capital, Pretoria - the decrease started earlier and has continued.

"The drop in new cases nationally combined with the sustained drop in new cases seen here in Gauteng province, which for weeks has been the center of this wave, indicates that we are past the peak," Marta Nunes, senior researcher at the Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics department of the University of Witwatersrand, said.

"It was a short wave ... and the good news is that it was not very severe in terms of hospitalizations and deaths," she said. It is "not unexpected in epidemiology that a very steep increase, like what we saw in November, is followed by a steep decrease."

5,43,414 No. of new cases reported globally in the past 24 hours
27,46,28,461 Total no. of cases worldwide
53,58,978 Total no. of deaths worldwide

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