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Believed to be largely driven by the omicron variant. south africa is seeing a positivity rate of 24.3% which is extraordinary. there's not enough data yet on hospitalizations because that is a lagging indicator. south africa's national institute severity of the disease develops over time. these are the early days of the fourth wave of the disease here in africa. so far, about 3 million people have caught the virus at the start of the pandemic, hovering around 90,000. >> reporter: i'm ivan watson in hong kong, authorities in the new south wales have ordered an investigation into the cluster of...

And the positivity rate of 24.3% in south africa is also out of the ordinary. the health ministry here saying just two months ago the positivity rate was under 5%. so you can see how quickly that has jumped. the other two tidbits to take out of of this is that they're seeing some reinfections from people who were already vaccinated who are getting covid again but they don't know if this will be more serious than delta, for instance. another tidbit also to take out from the data that we've seen from south africa, the national institute of communicable diseases and one of the things was that som...

Pandemic, and death around 90,000. however, the important thing to take away from here is the quadrupling of cases in four days. that's extraordinary. a positivity rate of 24.3%. it's still early days to figure out the number of hospitalizations related to omicron variant because still, like i say, early days. cases are up, hospitalizations are up. and in one small of area, in the province of gauteng, some of those admitted in the hospital are under 2 years old. they're also seeing in south africa, somewhere already vaccinated are getting reinfected. but the infections are less severe. and omi...

For sure. they know those are vaccinated are getting reinfected but it could be too early to tell, because south africa is entering its early days. and south africa's communicable diseases stage, it takes time for severe disease to develop. it may lower at the beginning and end of the wave. that may explain why they just don't have an update. but south africa's number of covid cases 2 million. the deaths 90,000 as a result of the pandemic. in that small area, some of those children are getting infected are less than 2 years old. they're getting hospitalized. and yet we don't have enough data t...

Can run our schools and in the positivity rate is concerning. so that's under the age of 11 that you pointed out. we also have data from ages 12 to 19 and i believe it's like 24.3% right now and those are individuals who can be vaccinated. so it's concerning because we need to be able to run schools and we need to make sure that people aren't testing positive or needing to quarantine. >> superintendent simon, best of luck to you. keep us updated and we thank you for appearing this evening. >> thank you. i appreciate this. just ahead, how the surging delta variant is affecting children and se...