South Africa will have vaccine from April 2021, guarantees government

South African Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said today in an interview with public television that the first vaccines from covid-19 will arrive in the second quarter of 2021 in the country, which has more than 10,000 daily infections.

South Africa will have vaccine from April 2021, guarantees government

South African official stressed to the public channel SABC that vaccines will be "safe" for public health.

According to the Government, covid -19 vaccines are currently undergoing regulatory evaluation around the world, and, in this sense, the country is waiting to hear from the Covax program of the World Health Organization ( WHO the type of vaccine that will be allocated to South Africa.

President Ramaphosa stressed on Monday that South Africa has completed all the necessary processes to ensure its participation in the WHO covid -19 vaccination program , saying it promises to guarantee equitable access to the new coronavirus prevention vaccines. as soon as they are available on the market.

"As part of this program, we expect that South Africa will receive the first vaccines to cover about 10% of our population in the first half of next year," Cyril Ramaphosa told the country .

The Africa South faces currently a second exponential wave of pandemic of the new coronavirus , being the country most affected on the continent with 883,687 cases of infection of covid -19 and 23,827 deaths , according to the South African Health authorities.

With 5.9 million tests performed, South African authorities reported 10,000 new infections and 166 deaths in the past 24 hours.

The Western Cape province, with 162,574 case of covid -19 and 3,000 new infections , is the second most affected in the country, after Gauteng (249,181 cases and 1,795 new infections ), followed by KwaZulu- Natal (146,819 cases and 2,743 new infections ), while the Eastern Cape (153 085 cases), the fourth province of the country most affected , decreased by 1,956 infections to 1,619 cases of covid -19.

On Monday, President Cyril Ramaphosa decreed the closure of beaches in KwaZulu -Natal, only on days 16, 26 and 31 December , and on days 1,2 and 3 January , and all the beaches in the Eastern Cape and in the Garden Route district, in the Western Cape, during the festive season that runs from December 16 to January 3 .

The Democratic Alliance (DA), the main opposition party, filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the controversial closure of the Garden Route beaches on the festive season, arguing that it was a measure "irrational and arbitrary" to prevent the spread of covid -19.

The Africa South locally produced 20,000 fans at an average cost of 12,500 rand (695 euros) per unit, a totoal of 13.9 million euros, to assist patients covid -19, said Minister of Industry and Trade, Ebrahim Patel , in an information to parliament requested by the opposition party Freedom Economic Fighters ( EFF ).

Respiratory disease covid -19 is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December 2019 in Wuhan , a city in central China.