As the fifth Covid-19 wave approaches, the Department of Health says it is keeping a keen eye on variants of concern.   

On Tuesday, the department's Director-General, Sandile Buthelezi, said despite new waves, the country was at a point where things could go back to relative normality.  

Speaking at the FF Ribeiro in the Pretoria CBD, where the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) pledged to donate R6.8-billion to strengthen South Africa's HIV prevention, care and treatment, Buthelezi said there was no need for South Africans to panic about the current stringent lockdown in China. 

The Asian country put in strict lockdowns in Shanghai that had left residents struggling to access to food and medical care. 

Buthelezi said: "This is an important time for us in South Africa as we are transitioning out of Covid. We are monitoring our numbers through surveillance and just to ensure we pick up variants of concern. The new waves that come will be determined by behavioural and biological factors. Behavioural is how we look after ourselves and of course biological is new variants. We know that variants mutate."

He said while the department was monitoring new emerging variants, they thought it was also essential to get back to relative normalcy. 

"We are at a stage where we think we can go back to normal."

Buthelezi said he did not think South Africa would have an outbreak as bad as China's. He said that was likely because the country had more community immunity than China. 

He said South Korea, which had high rates of community immunity, recently went through a new wave and fared better than China. 

On Monday, Tulio de Oliveira from the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, said the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 had been detected locally.

John Blandford, country director for the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in South Africa, said it was important for people to get vaccinated.  

"What we know in South Africa is that many people have been exposed to Covid-19 from infection. That is not optimal because that might not give you strong protection as vaccination would.

"It is still important for people to get vaccinated because we don't know what the new variants are going to be like. 

"We are hearing that new variants are emerging right now; we don't know how serious they are, how easily transmittable they are. We will learn more as we go forward. Vaccination is our defence."

He said in the drive to ramp up vaccination, it was important to ensure that people had easy access. 

"There are a lot of people who are willing to get vaccinated, but it is not accessible. I think it is important to put vaccination sites around things people want to do, like rugby matches and restaurants. They should be at places that allow people to socialise and allow things to get back to normal."