For the second straight day, none of SA's provinces recorded more than 1,000 new Covid-19 cases in 24 hours.

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases said on Friday that there were 3,648 new Covid-19 cases identified in the past 24 hours, taking the total number of laboratory-confirmed cases to 2,877,063 since the outbreak of the pandemic.

The new cases came at a 8.3% positivity rate.

Of the new cases, the majority were in the Western Cape (748), followed by KwaZulu-Natal (744) and the Eastern Cape (611). No other province recorded more than 500 cases in the preceding 24 hours.

The NICD said that, according to national health department data, there were another 173 Covid-19 related deaths reported in the past 24 hours, bringing total fatalities to 85,952 to date.

The latest data also showed there were 199 hospital admissions in the past 24 hours, meaning that the total number of people currently being treated in hospital was 9,076.

According to the latest vaccination data, there were 212,830 jabs administered in the past 24 hours, up to 5pm on Friday. This means that there have been 15,913,116 vaccines given to date.

In terms of those who are fully vaccinated, there have been 3,468,472 people given the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine and 4,392,322 have received their second shot of the two-dose Pfizer vaccine.

TimesLIVE