The president of South Africa has reintroduced a ban on alcohol sales and ordered the closure of all pubs as part of new restrictions to help the country fight a coronavirus revival, including a new variant.
Cyril Ramaphosa also announced in a nationwide speech on Monday that all beaches and public swimming pools in the country’s hotspots, including Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and several coastal areas, will be closed.
In addition, South Africa is extending its night clock by four hours, which requires all residents to be home from 21:00 to 06:00, the president said.
‘Reckless behavior due to alcohol poisoning has contributed to increased transmission. “Alcohol-related accidents and violence are putting pressure on our emergency units in the hospital,” Ramaphosa said.
“As we had to in the early days of exclusion, we now need to flatten the curve to protect the capacity of our healthcare system so that it can respond effectively to this new wave of infections.”
Ramaphosa said the ban on the sale of alcohol and other new restrictions would take effect Monday at midnight. This includes the mandatory wearing of masks in public, and anyone who does not wear a mask in a public place will be subject to a fine or a criminal charge punishable by a possible jail sentence, the president said.
Ramaphosa said the increased restrictions were necessary due to an increase in Covid-19 infections that had pushed South Africa’s total confirmed virus cases more than 1 million.
“It is known that almost 27 000 South Africans died due to Covid-19. “The number of new coronavirus infections is increasing at an unprecedented rate,” he said. “More than 50,000 new cases have been reported since Christmas Eve.”
Ramaphosa announced the new measures after a cabinet meeting and an emergency meeting of the National Coronavirus Command Board. He said the new restrictions would be reviewed in a few weeks and that a relaxation would only be considered as the number of new cases and hospitalizations decreased.
The country surpassed the 1 million level in confirmed virus cases on Sunday night, when authorities reported that the country’s total number of cases during the pandemic reached 1,004,413, including 26,735 deaths.
Like Britain, South Africa is struggling with a variant of Covid-19 that, according to medical experts, is more contagious than the original. According to experts, the variant is dominant in many parts of the country.
The South African Medical Association, which represents nurses and other health professionals as well as doctors, warned on Monday that the health system was on the verge of being overwhelmed by the combination of higher numbers of Covid-19 patients and people in urgent need of care. becomes due to alcohol. -related incidents. Many holiday events involve high alcohol consumption, which in turn often leads to increased trauma cases.
When South Africa previously had a total ban on liquor sales, trauma cases in hospitals fell by as much as 60%, according to government statistics. When the ban on alcohol sales was lifted, trauma cases fell back to previous levels.
South Africa’s seven – day moving average of confirmed daily cases has risen over the past two weeks from 11.18 new cases per 100,000 people on 13 December to 19.87 new cases per 100,000 people on 27 December.
When European Union countries began rolling out the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, which was approved by the bloc’s regulators last week, Spain said it would set up a register for people who refuse to be vaccinated and will share it with other member states.
The vaccine is not mandatory in Spain, but Salvador Illa, the Spanish health minister, told Spanish TV that the best way to defeat the virus was “to vaccinate us all – the more the better”.
Eight workers in the house Germany was accidentally injected with five doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, local authorities said on Monday – but there have been no serious adverse effects so far.
The seven women and one man, aged between 38 and 54, are employees of a retirement village in the town of Stralsund in northeastern Germany.
South Korea said on Tuesday it would sign an agreement with Moderna to offer Covid-19 vaccines to 20 million people, the Yonhap news agency reported, citing the presidential office. The country reported 40 deaths on Tuesday, a daily record.
This comes a day after officials promised to launch a public coronavirus vaccination program as the country discovered its first cases of the virus variant linked to the rapid increase in infections in Britain.
Other developments include:
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Thailand The Department of Public Health on Tuesday confirmed 155 new cases of coronavirus, most of which were locally transmitted infections.
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Indian Health authorities said on Tuesday they had found six people who had returned from Britain in the past few weeks positive for the new more contagious strain of the coronavirus. All six patients were kept in isolation.
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The United States military began vaccinating personnel in Japan and South Korea.