Tonight, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced some of the most drastic interventions in South Africa's history to contain the outbreak of the Sars-Cov-2 virus, which causes the diseases, COVID-19. 

The number of new cases today was almost four times that of the previous day.

We therefore needed drastic new measures to slow down the rate at which the virus spreads so that we can hopefully flatten the curve — in other words, spread out the number of Covid-19 patients who require hospital care over a longer period of time, so that our health system becomes less overwhelmed.  

Our Aisha Abdool Karim live tweeted President Ramaphosa’s address. Our deputy editor, Laura Lopez Gonzalez and I compiled these threads that divides the measures into themes:  

1, From midnight on Thursday, the country will be in lockdown and people will only be allowed to leave their houses in limited circumstances.
2. But some types of workers will be exempted from the lockdown, which the army has been called in to help enforce, these include healthcare workers, military personnel as people working in the food, water and telecommunication sectors. 
3. Ramaphosa’s address focused heavily on allying the country’s economic fears. The country has created a Solidarity Fund. People can donate now to what will become a board-managed Fund to help the country track the virus’ spread and help support patients.
4. Government has already contributed R150-million and the Rupert and Oppenheimer families each donated R1-billion. 
6. South Africa is also broadening efforts to detect cases, deploying community healthcare workers to expand testing and screening, focusing on high-density and high-risk areas — like Gauteng, which remains the epicentre of the country’s outbreak. 

If you lost track of some parts of the President's speech, and wanted to listen to it again, you can listen our recorded live feed.

Until tomorrow,  

Mia Malan
Editor-in-Chief
@miamalan