Chairperson of the COVID-19 Ministerial Advisory Committee, Professor Salim Abdool Karim, says the real extent of the coronavirus outbreak in South Africa will only be known once a new survey has been completed.
Government is embarking on a Seroprevalence Survey which will look for antibodies against the coronavirus and COVID-19. This will enable officials to determine who was infected and did not know it.
Karim has warned that South Africa still faces the risk of a second wave of the coronavirus.
South Africa is no longer among the top five countries with the highest number of coronavirus cases globally because it has been recording fewer infections.
Below is the COVID-19 stats for South Africa recorded in the last 24 hours:
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Karim says those who are infected and do not know can still spread the virus.
“We have an estimated 600 000 odd cases, that’s only the cases we know about, these are people who are sick and came forward for a test but there’s a lot of people that do not get sick. They get the infection and they are either asymptomatic or they are mildly symptomatic. Many countries have done seroprevalence surveys and we are in the midst of doing one ourselves right now and that will tell us for every case we know about how many infections are there we just don’t know about.”
Anti-diarrhoea drug being tested for possible coronavirus treatment
Scientists at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town have started a new trial to investigate the potential to repurpose an anti-diarrhea drug, Nitazoxanid, in order to treat COVID-19.
This low-cost drug is one of several that scientists are hoping to repurpose in order to fight the virus.
Pulmonologists at Groote Schuur say that the anti-diarrheal agent has shown to be deadly to SARS-COVID 2, which is what causes COVID-19.
Over 900 participants have been enrolled in the trial and it will be running in various places countrywide.
In the video below, Professor Keertan Dheda, who is the head of Pulmonology at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital speaks more about the drug:
