Gauteng province has officially surpassed the Western Cape to become the epicentre of COVID-19 in South Africa on Wednesday, July 8.
This came to the fore when Minister of Health Dr Zweli Mkhize announced the country’s latest COVID -19 statistics towards midnight.
Mkhize said the country has recorded 8,811 new cases of Covid-19 on Wednesday, taking the total number of confirmed infections to 224,665. Gauteng accounted for 3,527 of those new cases, replacing the Western Cape as the province with the highest number of confirmed infections. The province, which is the economic hub of the country, now has 75,015 cases compared to 73,292 cases in the Western Cape, which recorded 1,136 new infections in the past 24 hours.
Mkhize also said 98 patients succumbed to the disease in the past 24 hours, ballooning the total death number to 3,600 in SA.
The Western Cape remains the province with the highest numbers of deaths (2,192), followed by the Eastern Cape (582), Gauteng (478) and KwaZulu-Natal (223).
There have been 106,842 recoveries, a recovery rate of 47.5%.
