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"Professor Salim Abdool Karim, the South African government’s chief adviser, has been talking to foreign journalists this morning about the country’s much-praised effort to tackle the threat posed by the pandemic.

Karim said South Africa had been on a similar trajectory to the UK for three weeks before its epidemic “took a different turn”.

President Cyril Ramaphosa moved rapidly and decisively to impose one of the strictest lockdowns in the world in late March.

Authorities also rolled out a very proactive screening and testing programme which has meant the country of 56 million has suffered just 148 deaths and has just over 7,000 confirmed cases.

“We put 30,000 community health workers on the ground and decided to actively go out and look for outbreaks, and stem the tide before cases reached hospitals,” he said.


The biggest challenges for South Africa have been in crowded, poor townships where around a third of the population live and where social distancing measures are impractical.

Karim, a globally respected epidemiologist, said he expected to see continuing outbreaks in prisons, hospitals, pharmacies, bakeries and “all over” because of the “nature of South African society” but that health authorities would “deal with it and resolve the problems” when they came up.

The peak of the outbreak in South Africa will come between July and early September, Karim said, with different mathematical models suggesting different timescales.

The relatively low number of cases across Africa have prompted speculation that populations were less vulnerable to Covid-19 for some so far unclear reason.