Three weeks after the mask mandate was lifted, Covid-19 cases have not risen sharply, but Minister of Health Joe Phaahla says a mask mandate must remain available in case of future coronavirus waves.
As virologists around the world express concern about a new Covid-19 subvariant known as Centaurus, which is thought to be extremely transmissible with the potential to cause more severe disease, some of the 10 affected countries are reminding people to get vaccinated because the pandemic is not over.
On 14 July at a press conference, the director of the World Health Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, said subvariants of Omicron, such as BA.4 and BA.5, continue to drive waves of cases, hospitalisation and death around the world. Phaahla repealed the rules on 22 June, but Piet le Roux from Sakeliga said their case highlights a number of concerns they have.
In his affidavit before the Pretoria High Court, Phaahla said a mask mandate must remain available as a tool to fight a new outbreak of infections. “Although there has been a fifth wave of Covid-19 infections, it has turned out to be unexpectedly short-lived and neither as transmissible nor virulent as its predecessors… It is clear that the fifth wave has run its course,” Phaahla said.
“The immune landscape in South Africa is very complex,” said Dr Richard Lessells from the KwaZulu-Natal Research and Innovation Sequencing Platform, where Omicron was first identified. “Because we’ve had these five waves of infection and we’ve got vaccines, we’ve got this kind of complex mix of immunity.”
Blood donor data published in a May preprint estimates that as many as 98% of people in South Africa had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. One in 10 of these had protection solely from vaccination and no previous infection. “Omicron had so many mutations and changes to its structure that essentially many of the antibodies that had been triggered by previous infection just didn’t recognise it,” says Professor Penny Moore, South African Research Chair of Virus-Host Dynamics at the University of the Witwatersrand and the NICD. “It was like Omicron was wearing a different coat altogether.”
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