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The number of Covid-19 infections topped three million in South Africa on Friday as new daily infections driven by the Omicron variant rose steeply, official figures showed.
A leading epidemiologist Salim Abdool Karim had earlier this week forecast that coronavirus cases in the continent’s worst hit country, could see daily infections more than treble this week to more than 10,000.
On Friday 16,055 new cases were reported in a 24-hour reporting cycle, taking the cumulative laboratory-confirmed cases to 3,004,203.
“This increase represents a 24.3 percent positivity rate,” the government run National Institute for Communicable Diseases said in a daily update.
The sharp rise in infections is blamed on the highly contagious new Omicron strain which was first reported by South African scientists on November 25.