South African Covid-19 Hospitalizations Exceed 7,000, Deaths Rise 

(Bloomberg) -- South African hospitals have 7,339 Covid-19 patients admitted of which 6.8% are in intensive care units, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases said in a report on Wednesday.

Of the 497 people in ICU, 190 are on ventilators, the institute said. Of the admissions 3,086 are in Gauteng, the province that includes Johannesburg and Pretoria. 

The numbers compare with the 6,895 who were in the hospital a day earlier, with 6.8%, the same proportion, of those in ICU.

“There has been a small increase in deaths in all provinces except Northern cape and Western Cape,” the NICD said in a separate weekly hospitalization report that analyzed data in the seven days to Dec. 11.

The Nov. 25 announcement of the discovery of a new coronavirus variant, now named omicron, had sparked concerns of a flood of hospitalizations and severe infections. The country’s three biggest private hospital groups have said that so far cases in the country appear to be milder than in previous infection waves.

The number of people in the hospital due to Covid-19 is, so far, about a third of the total at the height of earlier infection waves. 

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