The Overseas Situation Report Friday 6 August 2021
by Mike Evans
“Tough times are normal to come in your journey of life. If we think about it with a calm head, there is a higher possibility we’ll deal with it better.”
― Sarvesh Jain
To conclude another week of Overseas reports I will finish my roundup of the situation in the rest of the world with a look at Africa, Asia and Oceania. This will look at comparisons of a week ago to get a feel for what is happening in these areas.
First to Africa, where the cases have been on the increase for the past few months. Well there seems to be some good news in that the cases in the last week have dropped by 7% compared to the previous week. However with the good comes the bad in that the number of deaths in the past week has increased by 2% compared to the previous 7 days.
To look at this continent in detail, South Africa has been the main country where the virus has been the most prolific. However in the past week the country has seen the number of news cases drop by 7% from 81,053 to 75,484. The country also says that the number of deaths in the week fell by 8% although the figure of 2,507 is actually 37.5% of the total deaths in the whole of Africa in the past week.
This comes while Cape Town is struggling to cope with more than 38,000 active cases of COVID-19, making it the epicenter of the pandemic in Africa’s worst-hit country.
The provincial chairman of the Democratic Nursing Organization of South AfrIca, Elenor Roberts, said medical staff members were under immense pressure. “As of now, the situation in our rural areas, it is dire,” because there are so many COVID patients who need attention and “so few staff to look after these patients,” Roberts said. She said there were about 13,000 nurses in Western Cape province, far too few to handle the workload.
To date the country has administered over 8 million doses of vaccine but there is a lot of skepticism in the country about vaccines. About 54% of South Africans say they are unlikely to get a Covid-19 vaccine and almost half say they believe prayer provides more protection than the shots against contracting the disease, a survey showed.
The Afrobarometer survey of 1,600 South Africans highlights a hurdle for the government’s drive to inoculate two-thirds of its 60 million people in a bid to curb infections in the country, which is Africa’s worst hit by the disease, according to official statistics. Hesitancy is highest among those below the age of 35 and among the poor, according to the survey. Just 28% of those surveyed trust the government to ensure vaccines are safe.
Elsewhere in Africa there have been a number of countries showing increases in case in the past week. Morocco saw a 76% increase in cases compared to the previous week and has the second highest number of cases behind South Africa with 55,410 new cases in the week. More worrying is that the death count increased by 110% from 167 to 350 people in the past week. Kenya, Ethiopia Nigeria and Mauritania all showed increases compared to the previous 7 days. As has been highlighted in these reports in the past the big issue for Africa is getting the vaccines out to the people. The lack of a stable health service in many countries and the sheer size of nations is making the vaccination programme very difficult and there are fears that Africa will be left behind in the world which is a bad thing for all the countries across the world.
In Asia the pandemic continues to hit many countries and this week saw an increase in new case across the 49 states that make up the Region of 13% compared to the previous 7 days. There were 1,822,642 new cases in the week and dceaths rose by 17% to 31,237. The countries with the largest number of cases were Indonesia and India. In Indonesia the health ministry has recorded 1,747 new deaths of Covid-19 in the last 24 hours, pushing the nation’s total deaths to 100,636.
The south-east Asian country has been struggling to cope with the highly contagious Delta variant since it was first discovered in Indonesia in late June. According to Our World in Data, Indonesia’s total number of infections has now reached 3.53 million.
The country recorded a huge rise in cases at the beginning of July, and more than 30,100 deaths. High fatality numbers have left much of the country frustrated with their government, blaming a slow vaccine rollout, while others point blame at conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers. The COVID-19 death rate for people in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta who were not vaccinated was more than three times higher than those who were, according to new health ministry data.
As with Africa the issue is with the speed of the vaccination programme. In Indonesia, 18% of the population have had one dose of a vaccine, while 8% are fully vaccinated, according to health ministry data. Indonesia has had 100,600 deaths.
In India where they have seen a reduction in cases in recent weeks the past week saw an increase of 5%. However, on the good news front deaths reduced in the week by 1%. In terms of vaccinations, in India 27.7% of the population have had one dose of a vaccine and 7.8 % are fully vaccinated, according to government data.
Other countries where there has been a big increase in cases in the past week include Turkey where they have seen a 56% increase, Iran 23%, and Japan where the focus of the world is on the Olympic games, they have seen an increase of 110% in new cases in the week from 35,142 to 73,533. Japan is preparing to expand emergency restrictions to eight more prefectures to fight a surge in COVID-19 cases, as worries grow about strains on the medical system in Tokyo as it hosts the Olympics.
On Wednesday, Tokyo reported a record 4,166 new cases, while nationwide new cases topped 14,000. “New infections are rising at an unprecedented fast pace,” Economic Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura told a panel of experts reviewing the proposal for expanded restrictions. “Not just in the national capital region, but starting with the Kansai region and northern Kanto region, the number of new infections has surged across the whole country at levels we have never seen before.”
“The situation on the ground is extremely severe,” he said, adding: “We are seeing clusters where we’d seldom seen them before, such as at department stores, hairdressers and cram schools.”
The latest steps, to take effect from Sunday, mean more than 70 percent of Japan’s population will be under some restrictions. Already, six prefectures including Tokyo are under full states of emergency, which will remain in place until August 31, while a further five are under less strict “quasi-emergency” directives.
Finally to Oceania, and in the past week the region has seen a surge in new cases in Fiji, Australia and French Polynesia. In the region which since the start of the pandemic has fared better than most other areas in the world. In Australia there has been a 34% increase in new cases in the past week. Sydney reported its worst day of the Covid-19 pandemic on Thursday with five deaths and a record rise in locally acquired infections as a weeks-long hard lockdown is struggling to contain the highly contagious Delta strain of the coronavirus.
Four of the five people that died were unvaccinated while one had one dose, New South Wales state health authorities said, as they implored residents to get inoculated as early as possible.
Authorities also announced a one-week lockdown from Thursday in the region surrounding the state’s second-largest city of Newcastle, 140 kilometers (87 miles) north of Sydney, after six cases were reported there.
That will place an additional 615,000 people under lockdown, raising the total in New South Wales under strict stay-home restrictions to 6 million people out of 8 million in the state, or about a quarter of Australia’s population.
In the state of Queensland, whose capital Brisbane is under lockdown, another 16 Covid-19 cases were reported on Thursday, the same as the previous two days.
The state of Victoria, meanwhile, entered a weeklong lockdown as of 8 p.m. Thursday. People in Victoria must stay home unless they are doing essential work, buying food, getting exercise, receiving or providing healthcare or getting a Covid-19 vaccine.
With the new restrictions in place, some 13 million people across Australia’s three largest cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane will be under lockdown from Thursday night.
Meanwhile in French Polynesia, the increase in the week has been just under 2000 new cases or a 34% rise. Restrictions are being reintroduced in French Polynesia in a bid to counter a rapidly worsening Covid-19 pandemic.
Within two weeks, the incidence of the virus has increased more than 40-fold, with case numbers since the start of the pandemic topping 20,000, including 149 fatalities.
While there was no Covid-19 patient in the hospitals in mid-July, the wards are again filling fast, with 40 patients in care and eight of them in ICUs. More than 90 percent of those admitted have not been vaccinated.
The French High Commission and the French Polynesian government have set a stop to all public events, limited public gatherings to no more than 20 people and funerals to 15.
A reintroduction of a curfew has been mooted, should the latest measures fail to curb the spread of the virus. Despite an abundance of vaccines, only about a third of the population has been inoculated, with officials warning almost 80,000 doses risk expiry by October. As with many people in Africa the local Polynesians are suspicious of vaccines and the government has had a hard time trying to convince people otherwise.
So in the past three reports we have been around the world and one thing we can see from these reports is that this virus is still amongst us and is not going to go away anytime soon.
So until the next time Stay Safe.
Total Cases Worldwide – 201,212,343
Total Deaths Worldwide – 4,274,299
Total Recovered Worldwide – 181,175,212
Total Active Cases Worldwide – 15,762,832 (7.8% of the total cases)
Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 185,449,511
Information and resources:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#countries
https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/448256/tahiti-gripped-by-new-covid-19-wave