Africa's top public health official said on Thursday that severe lockdowns were no longer the best way to contain Covid-19, praising SA for adopting that approach when responding to its latest infection wave driven by the Omicron variant.
“We are very encouraged with what we saw in SA during this period where they look at the data in terms of severity ," John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention , told a news conference.
SA experienced a steep rise in Covid-19 infections from late November, around the time it alerted the world to Omicron, with new infections peaking in mid-December at an record. Nkengasong added that he feared that Covid-19 could become endemic on the continent given the slow pace of vaccination — a prospect many global scientists already talk of as a given.
Experts believe Covid-19 cannot be eliminated and will likely become endemic, meaning it will always be present in the population to some degree, such as the flu or chickenpox.
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