What the 21-day “stay-at-home” whole-country lockdown means!
The President of South Africa has just announced a 21-day “stay-at-home” whole-country lockdown to flatten the curve. This is what that means.
Union Buildings, South Africa (23 March 2020) – President Cyril Ramaphosa has just announced a 21-day “stay-at-home” whole-country lockdown for South Africa effective from Thursday the 26th of March 2020.
The continued spread of the coronavirus SARS-Cov-2 is a major concern as the country only has a short window of opportunity to “flatten the curve” prior to the infection point, by reducing interactions between infected and uninfected people.
The goal is to control the spread of COVID-19 through steps to test the susceptible population, quarantine the suspected cases and offer treatment to the infected and confirmed, as well as block the transmission route in the shortest time and limited space.
In November 2019, the first cases of a new disease, later named COVID-19 by the World Health Organisation, were reported by health care workers from Wuhan, China. In December 2019, researchers from Wuhan reported a cluster of pneumonia cases caused by a novel coronavirus, which has since been named SARS-CoV-2. In just 3 months, as of March 20, SARS-CoV-2 transmission has resulted in over 360 000 cases of COVID-19 that have been reported in 166 countries worldwide.
Valuable lessons are being learnt from the experiences of each country dealing with the COVID-19 epidemic and some trends are emerging including nine essential lessons on fighting coronavirus from around the world5.
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