Covid 19 hospitalizations in a populous South African province are rapidly rising, where a new omicron variant has been detected.
Since the beginning of November, hospitalizations across the country have increased 63 percent since the beginning of November, according to data from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases. Hospitalizations in Gauteng, a province that includes the nation's largest city, Johannesburg, have gone up nearly 400 percent since the beginning of the month, from 120 for the week ending Nov. 6 to 580 for the week ending Saturday.
South Africa's NICD, part of the group of researchers and government institutions that first reported the variant to the World Health Organization, said in a statement that omicron cases were found in Gauteng at a relatively high frequency. The WHO cautioned against drawing conclusions about a link between the omicron variant and the increase in hospitalizations.
According to data collected by Our World in Data, South Africa has been vaccinated with 28 percent of its 60 million residents with at least one dose of a Covid vaccine. As a whole, African countries have vaccinated about 10 percent of their population, compared to 64 percent in North America.
The WHO labeled omicron a variant of concern Friday, and on Monday it said that the variant poses a very high risk to the world. Multiple countries have bans on travel from southern African nations, a ban that was criticized by the WHO after the news of the variant.
The variant was first detected in Botswana. It has been identified in other countries, including Israel and Canada since then.
According to the data, no other province in South Africa has seen more than a doubling of hospitalizations in November. Fewer than half of the country's nine provinces have seen an increase in recent weeks.
In the last seven days, there have been 29,373 cases and 219 deaths in South Africa, according to an analysis from the Johns Hopkins Coronaviruses Resource Center. Deaths have increased compared to the previous seven-day period, and cases are up as well. South Africa's recent case rate ranks it among the half of countries with the highest rates, adjusted for population.
South Africa has reported 2,963, 679 cases and 89,822 deaths since the start of the epidemic.