This morning on CBS’s Face the Nation, Dr. Tulio de Oliveira, director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation in South Africa, offered a guardedly optimistic assessment of how the Omicron variant might be playing out there:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Do you believe that you are past the peak of infection in South Africa because recent trends are suggesting there's a slowing?
DE OLIVEIRA: So- so we- we do not know, and one should always be very careful to look at the individual day- daily tests. What one has to do is to look at the general trend of seven or 14 days. What we know is that last week we were adding the highest number of infections from Omicron. And what we are going to be doing is looking very carefully at that data, potentially halting and Johannesburg may have peak. But what we have seen is that this has spread for the other eight provinces. South Africa has nine provinces, which, like similar states in America and in all of the other eight provinces, the numbers are increasing and increasing very fast.
Unfortunately for all of us, within a few hours these hopeful forecasts have apparently turned to ashes. First came the stunning news that South Africa’s President Ramaphosa tested positive for Covid-19 four days after returning from an official trip to four different countries in West Africa, at least one of which (Nigeria, now seeing an exponential increase in new cases that have more than quadrupled in the past five days, from a weekly caseload of less than 700 to nearly 3,000 as of today) may be directly linked to his case — several members of his entourage tested positive during the trip and had to be sent home early. Fortunately, Pres. Ramaphosa was fully vaccinated, unlike the vast majority of his fellow citizens where vaccine hesitancy is a growing problem; and his symptoms have been described as mild, though he has turned over the duties of his office to his vice-president for at least the next week.
Much worse was to come tonight when the day’s total of positive tests was released, and the number is absolutely staggering as this chart indicates:
Now in all fairness to Dr. Oliveira, I probably would have concurred in his estimation at the time, since it did look like the terrifying rate of growth in new cases over the past couple of weeks might indeed be showing signs of moderating. Both Saturday’s and Friday’s numbers were less than the apparent peak reached on Thursday (22,388), and these were all well under the single day record set back on July 3 (26,645). But today saw a mind-numbing 37,875 new cases, nearly 70% above what we saw Thursday, and more than 40% higher than the previous all-time record set during the height of the Delta surge. This also drives the 7-day total to nearly 136,000 and will almost certainly eclipse the old record of not quite 140,000 with tomorrow’s number.
And while these stats may seem almost benign to those of us in the US who have had to deal with far larger numbers for far too many months now, it should be noted that South Africa has already surpassed the US in terms of per capita new cases for this week — which now stands at twice the infection rate it saw last week, an order of magnitude higher than two weeks ago, and a full 35-fold increase from just three weeks ago.
The real crunch comes in the next few days. If today’s numbers are just an aberration that often marks a blowout type peak and a real decline or at least a plateau sets in shortly, then perhaps we can start to breathe a little easier after all. OTOH, if they continue their strong upward trend into ever higher record territory, it will become all too painfully obvious that neither vaccinations nor prior exposure status will prove more than a minor impediment to the onward march of Omicron; in which case we can only hope that at least the vaccines will help keep most of us from being hospitalized or worse (and if we’re really lucky, this variant proves less virulent than its predecessors, so at least the continuing death toll won’t be quite so bad).