When identified late last year, medical professionals were concerned that the variant – known as 501.v2 – would drive up Covid-19 infections. Professor Salim Abdool Karim said the strain had a higher viral load, meaning it could spread between people with ease. The infection rate rapidly increased, with President Cyril Ramaphosa reintroducing level 3 lockdown restrictions. As Gabriele Steinhauser of The Wall Street Journal writes, ‘A new coronavirus strain was surging across the country, thousands of holidaymakers were due to return from Covid-19 hot spots, and one in three coronavirus tests was coming back positive’. Then all of a sudden, cases of Covid-19 started to drop. ‘The cause of this steep decline in cases remains somewhat of a mystery’, says The Wall Street Journal, with Harry Moultrie of the NICD even telling Steinhauser ‘anybody who professes certainty [about why infections started dropping] is lying’. – Jarryd Neves