SA Records 18,035 New COVID-19 Infections

South Africa has recorded another 37,875 new Coronavirus infections of which 18,035 are new infections.

The latest numbers also include 19,840 antigen tests, the results of rapid antigen testing in COVID-19 statistics.

This pushes the country’s known caseload since the start of the pandemic to more than 3,167,400.

This increase represents a 28.9% positivity rate.

The NICD says it was informed in the previous week that information technology (IT) challenges had been experienced by public sector laboratories, which have resulted in reporting delays.

“Some COVID-19 surveillance data may take longer to reflect on the national line list. This means that some COVID-19 surveillance data may take longer to reflect on the national line list.”

Twenty-one people have also died in South Africa after contracting the coronavirus, pushing the national death toll to 90,137.

So far 2,913,232 people have recovered from the pandemic. 

The majority of new cases today are from Gauteng with (42%), followed by KwaZulu-Natal with (16%), Western Cape 13% and Eastern Cape and Free State each accounted for 6%.

Mpumalanga and North West each accounted for 5%, Limpopo accounted for 4%; and Northern Cape accounted for 2% of the new cases. 

On the vaccination front, about 27.1 million jabs of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered so far. 

The NICD says there has also been an increase of 96 hospital admissions in the past 24 hours.