SA Hits 3 Million COVID-19 Infections Mark after 16,055 Recorded Cases

South Africa has reached the three million COVID-19 infection mark after recording another 16,055 new Coronavirus infections.

This pushes the country’s known caseload since the start of the pandemic to more than 3,004,203.

This increase represents a 24.3% positivity rate.

Twenty-five more people have also died in South Africa after contracting the coronavirus, pushing the national death toll to 8,9,944.

The majority of new cases today are from Gauteng (72%), the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal each accounted for 6% and North West 5% while Mpumalanga accounted for 4% and Limpopo 3%.

The Free State and Eastern Cape each accounted for 2% while the Northern Cape accounted for 1% of Fridays’s new cases.

On the vaccination front, about 26,1 million jabs of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered so far. 

The NICD says there has also been an increase of 279 hospital admissions in the past 24 hours. 

On Friday,  Health Minister Joe Phaahla said over the last seven days the new spike had moved into Gauteng with infections also rising in all nine provinces including the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, North West and Mpumalanga with high positivity rates.

Phaahla said country was officially entering the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic after the detection to the Omicron variant.