NATIONAL NEWS - President Cyril Ramaphosa this evening announced that South Africa will move to adjusted alert 1 at midnight tonight.
The address followed meetings of the National Coronavirus Command Council and the President’s Coordinating Council.
Under adjusted alert level 1, the curfew is from 00:00 - 04:00. This means that non-essential establishments such as restaurants, bars and fitness centers must close at 23:00.
Alcohol sales are also permitted as per normal but no sales will be allowed after 23:00
The limit on the number of people at indoor gatherings is now 750, while the maximum number of people allowed at outdoor gatherings has been raised from 500 to 2 000.
100 people are now allowed to attend a funeral.
The wearing of masks remain mandatory.
As of Thursday 30 September, South Africa has recorded a total of 2.900,994 positive cases of Covid-19, with 1,678 new cases identified since the last report, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) announced.
The majority of the new cases are from Western Cape (22%), followed by KwaZulu-Natal (20%), Gauteng Province accounted for 14%; Eastern Cape & Free State accounted for 12% each; Northern Cape accounted for 10%; North West and Mpumalanga accounted for 5% each; and Limpopo accounted for 1% of today’s new cases.
The country has also recorded 101 Covid-19 related deaths, bringing total fatalities to 87,626 to date.
17,649,727 tests have been conducted in both public and private sectors.
There has been an increase of 128 hospital admissions in the past 24 hours.
“This is news that is welcome to us because we have been living under the shadow of the lockdown. We lost relatives, colleagues and livelihoods to this pandemic. Naturally we all want to resume to the activities that we have not been able to do for a long time, including church gatherings, sports events and cultural gatherings, to name a few,” said Ramaphosa as he urged every South African and everyone living in the country to get the jab.
“These new freedoms are within our reach but we will only be able to get there if we all vaccinate. We have administered over 17 million vaccines, with more than 8 million people fully vaccinated.
“We have a target of vaccinating over 70% of the population by the end of December, and should we reach this goal, according to the department of health, we will manage to save at least 20,000 lives.”
An additional 16 million people need to vaccinated if we are to reach our goal, said Ramaphosa.
The President further called on businesses to facilitate the vaccination of their workers.
Ramaphosa further announced that the Department of Health would soon be rolling out a vaccination certificate, which will provide a secure and verifiable proof of vaccination.
The certificate can be used to facilitate travel, access to establishments and gatherings and other forms of activity that require proof of vaccination status.
'We bring you the latest Garden Route, Karoo, Hessequa news'
