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South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa is on Tuesday scheduled to convene a meeting of the National Coronavirus Command Council to discuss a new variant detected in the country this week.
The new Covid sub-variant, known as XBB.1.5, has also been recorded in the US and UK.
It is an offshoot of the globally-dominant Omicron Covid variant and is highly transmissible.
President Ramaphosa confirmed Tuesday’s meeting to local journalists and urged South Africans not to panic.
“We are agile enough to want to have that meeting tomorrow, and thereafter there will be information that will be shared with the rest of the country,” he told Eyewitness News on Monday.
““Some people have said ‘are we going to have restrictions, the lockdown and all that?’ — far from that. We just need to be informed about what’s happening with this variant,” he added, according to Business Day news site.
South Africa recorded over three million Covid-19 infections at the height of the pandemic – the highest number of confirmed cases by any African country.