(Bloomberg) — The omicron coronavirus variant is spreading faster in Gauteng, the epicenter of the latest outbreak in South Africa, than the delta strain or any of the earlier mutations, an adviser to the provincial government said.
There is the “strongest acceleration in community transmission ever seen in South Africa,” Bruce Mellado, the adviser, said in a presentation on Thursday. This is “consistent with dominance of a variant that is more transmissible,” he said.
South Africa announced the discovery of a new variant, later christened omicron, on Nov. 25 as cases began to spike and the strain spread across the globe. National daily cases almost doubled on Wednesday, days after countries across the world halted flight to and from southern Africa.
Still, said Mellado, previous infections and the fact that about a quarter of South Africans are fully vaccinated may blunt its impact. Government scientists and actuaries at private companies have estimated that between 60% and 80% of South Africans were infected in earlier waves of the virus.
Active cases in the province will likely peak in coming weeks at about 40,000, as opposed to more than 100,000 during the third wave in the middle of this year, Mellado said. Hospitalizations due to Covid-19 will likely rise to about 4,000 compared with 9,500 in the third wave, he said.
Mellado is a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and uses modeling to predict the trajectory of infections.
A quarter of South Africa’s 60 million people live in Gauteng, the province that includes Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria.
(Updates with detail throughout)
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