"I believe Britain is overreacting"

Even one death is one too many. But will there be many more? Our experience in South Africa suggests not.

While Covid-19 admissions are rising sharply in more than half of our nine provinces, deaths are not rising as dramatically and neither is the average length of time people stay in hospital.

Admittedly, our laboratories do not carry out genetic sequencing for every death, so we do not know how many Covid-related deaths can be attributed to Omicron and how many to other variants.

But yesterday there were only 11 Covid-related deaths in South Africa, far fewer than the 578 weekly average reported at Delta’s peak.

If Omicron really were such a deadly variant, we would expect the numbers to have shot up, yet that simply isn’t happening here.

This makes it all the more peculiar to see what’s happening in the UK. This huge over-reaction is scaring people unnecessarily, and if your Government does decide go to for a hard lockdown in the New Year, that could end up doing far more harm than good.