06/03/2020
South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa has warned that the coronavirus will turn into a "national crisis" and its impact will be "huge".
His warning came after the first case of the coronavirus was detected in South Africa.
The patient is a 38-year-old man who visited Italy with his wife.
This brings to 27 the number of coronavirus cases reported in Africa. Algeria is worst-affected, with 17 cases, 16 of them in the same family.
The South African couple, who have two children, were part of a group of 10 who returned from Italy on 1 March, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said.
The man and the doctor who first treated him were both in self-isolation in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, he added.
A tracer team had been sent to KwaZulu-Natal to identify people who might have been in contact with the man and the doctor, Dr Mkhize said.
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Mr Ramaphosa urged South Africans not to panic and to get immediate medical help if they showed symptoms of Covid-19.
"It will have a huge impact on a number of things... travel... our economy. It is already showing signs of a negative impact on tourism.
"The effect will be big. South Africans will need to be prepared," he was quoted by privately owned Eyewitness News as saying.
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For now, South Africa is portraying its detection of the country's first Covid-19 patient as a sign of success - as proof that the public health systems of the continent's most-developed and sophisticated economy are working as planned.
"This is not… a failure. Our health systems [are] able to detect and rapidly identify cases," the National Institute for Communicable Diseases tweeted within hours of the announcement of the infection in KwaZulu-Natal.
