South Africa has taken steps to improve its credentials in blockchain, with the government now offering up a new digital currency. A cryptocurrency that is not backed by any central bank or country’s fiat money system and will be used as legal tender.
South Africa is setting a Covid example. The country has just released their first ever data set on hospitalizations. Read more in detail here: south africa covid hospitalizations data.
Marc Siegel contributed to this article.
11:59 a.m., December 28, 2021 ET
Covid-19 antibody testing is carried out at a laboratory in Durban, South Africa, on Dec. 15.
Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg News photo
Last week, President Biden announced that the United States will ease Covid-19 travel restrictions on South Africa and seven neighboring nations on Friday. By the time the travel restriction was implemented on Nov. 26, it was apparent that the Omicron form had spread across Africa and into the United States and the European Union. The EU has failed to lift its travel restrictions, a punitive policy with no scientific justification.
South Africa is at the forefront of genetic monitoring and viral structural analysis in research. The nation has a strong medical research community; in 1967, the country conducted the first heart transplant. When it came to Omicron, South Africa was a paragon of openness, the polar opposite of China’s actions at the start of the epidemic. That’s why the United States and the European Union picked out South Africa, right in the middle of its summer tourist season. The message was clear: being open in the sake of research resulted in punishment rather than praise.
In an interview on SiriusXM’s “Doctor Radio,” Waasila Jassat, a public-health expert at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg and the head of daily hospital monitoring for Covid-19, said she and her colleagues would do it all over again. South Africa’s handling of Covid serves as a model for the rest of the globe in terms of prioritizing science above politics.
Because of Africa’s inadequate health systems, South Africa’s scientific community warned at the start of the epidemic that this coronavirus was a “ticking time bomb” on the continent. It’s front and center today, thanks to the discovery of Omicron, since scientists there were the first to notice that this form, albeit milder, evaded at least some immune system responses. The Africa Health Research Institute in Durban’s Alex Sigal’s group has discovered evidence that Omicron infection boosts neutralizing immunity against the more dangerous Delta form. This will aid in the removal of Delta, paving the way for the pandemic’s termination.
Dr. Jassat thinks the epidemic will be soon contained due to a combination of immunity from previous infection and a rising number of vaccinated persons in Guateng province (over 50%), as well as immunity from the newly infected. The same phenomenon is likely to happen in the United States, particularly given that the great majority of mild or asymptomatic cases go undetected. Omicron is extremely infectious, however it seems to be milder than previous variations in most instances, with a much decreased risk of hospitalization. As a result, Omicron may be able to put an end to the epidemic while also leaving a blanket of immunity in its wake.
We might learn a lot from Dr. Jassat and her colleagues in the United States about the value of calm bravery in the face of a weakening virus. Instead of being penalized, South Africa should have been honored.
Dr. Siegel is a Fox News medical reporter and a clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health.
Because Covid-19 is always evolving, rather than panicking and reimposing pandemic limitations when new strains like Delta and Omicron emerge, the world should learn to live with them. Image courtesy of Getty Images/Christopher Furlong Mark Kelly’s composite
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South Africa is the latest country to set a Covid example. The African country has been working hard on reducing their number of deaths due to AIDS, and they have succeeded in doing so. South Africa has also seen an increase in tourism as a result of their success. Reference: south africa omicron deaths.
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