More than 80,000 people have succumbed to COVID-19 in South Africa since the onset of the pandemic in March of 2020, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) said on Wednesday.Trend reports citing Xinhua.
The country recorded 516 COVID-19 related deaths in the last 24 hours which brought the total number of fatalities to 80,469. Meanwhile, 13,251 new COVID-19 cases have been registered during the same period, which brings the total number of laboratory-confirmed cases to 2,722,202.
This came as the country was in the midst of the third wave which had been driven by the delta variant. While new cases in the most populated province Gauteng have declined in recent weeks, KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) has become the new epicenter of COVID-19.
"The total number of cases today is higher than yesterday and higher than the average number of new cases per day over the 7 preceding days. The 7-day moving average daily number of cases has decreased," said the NICD.