The warning comes after the UN health agency pointed to rising cases as the main driver of the rise in cases across Africa.
South Africa may be entering a fifth wave of COVID-19 sooner than expected after a sustained rise in infections over the past 14 days apparently driven by the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants, health officials and scientists said.
The country that has recorded the most coronavirus cases and deaths across the African continent, only a fourth wave came out earlier this year. Officials had forecast that a fifth wave could start in May or June, at the start of the southern hemisphere winter.
Health Minister Joe Phaahla told a news conference on Friday that although hospitalizations were rising, there had been no drastic change in intensive care unit admissions or deaths so far.
He added that at this stage, health authorities had not been alerted to any new variants, apart from changes to the dominant Omicron variant that first emerged in South Africa and Botswana in November, before spreading across the world.
Since February, cases had been falling South AfricaBut the number of infections started to rise last week and has been rising rapidly ever since.
The country is now seeing several thousand cases a day, up from a few hundred just a few weeks ago. The proportion of positive tests jumped from 4 percent in mid-April to 19 percent on Thursday, according to official figures.
Sewage surveillance has also shown increases in the spread of the coronavirus.
#COVID-19 UPDATE: 22,710 tests were performed in the last 24 hours, with 4,146 new cases, representing a positivity rate of 18.3%. Today @SaludZA reports 4 deaths that occurred in the last 24 to 48 hours. Total deaths is 100,355 to date. See more here: https://t.co/qFwhu0XAPH pic.twitter.com/AetL99xyoI
— NICD (@nicd_sa) April 28, 2022
Subvariants may be more transmissible
Infectious disease specialist Richard Lessells said at Friday’s briefing that waning immunity from previous waves could be contributing to a resurgence of cases sooner than expected.
He said the increasing proportion of infections attributed to Omicron’s BA.4 and BA.5 sublineages suggested that they had a growth advantage over other Omicron subvariants such as BA.2.
But Wassila Jassat of the National Institute of Communicable Diseases said that despite the rise in cases, there is still no sign that BA.4 and BA.5 are causing significantly more severe disease.
Since the start of the pandemic, South Africa has reported more than 3.7 million cases of COVID-19 in total and recorded more than 100,000 deaths.
Although the country’s 60 million people make up less than 5 percent of Africa’s population of 1.3 billion, it has had more than a quarter of the total number of reported cases on the continent.
To date, a third of adults across the country have been fully vaccinated, according to data compiled by the Reuters news agency.
Senior health official Nicholas Crisp also said Friday that the country had enough vaccine doses and did not plan to purchase more. He added that the government had no intention of buying Pfizer’s COVID-19 treatment pill Paxlovid for public sector patients, in part because it was so expensive.
On Thursday, the WHO office in Africa marked the current surge in South Africa’s infection rate as the main driver of a more widespread spike in cases on the African continent.