The country’s second hospitality vaccination site has opened at the Wild Coast Sun in the Eastern Cape.
The aim is to assist government to ramp up the vaccination numbers and to ensure that the hospitality sector recovers from the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Currently, it is estimated that over 100 people will be vaccinated at the site daily.
Wild Coast Sun General Manager Peter Tshidi says, “The key goal here is to minimise job losses because tourism is one of the badly infected industries across the globe and not only in SA. I think the first priority is to make sure we protect people’s jobs, and the second one would be to restore the traveller’s confidence in the industry and that’s why we doing the initiatives that we doing so that a traveller can look at and see that most frontline staff are vaccinated and safety protocols are in place and then they feel comfortable to start travelling again.”
SA COVID-19 stats
South Africa has administered over 9.5 million COVID-19 vaccines.
This as the country reports 7 983 new coronavirus infections in the last 24-hour cycle.
This brings the total number of cases to 2 613 569, while 299 more people have succumbed to COVID-19 related complications.
This puts the death toll at 77 440, as seen in the graphic below:
ICYMI: Latest #COVID19 statistics in South Africa
For more visit https://t.co/TS6YUmN424 pic.twitter.com/8RlnnkhjJK— SABC News (@SABCNews) August 17, 2021
Mass vaccinations to minimise deaths, hospitalisations
Meanwhile, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) says the coronavirus will never fully disappear, but mass vaccination will assist in minimising deaths and hospitalisations in the years to come.
This comes as many scientists question if South Africa and any other country in the world will ever reach population immunity, especially with the highly infectious Delta variant.
In the related video below, Professor Martin Veller, former Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Wits University, explains everything you need to know about vaccines:
