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Johannesburg (dpa) - In view of the acute fall in new corona infections in South Africa, Lufthansa is expanding its temporarily reduced range of flights there.
The airline announced on Wednesday that there will again be three weekly flights between Cape Town and Frankfurt from the end of March.
In addition, the flights between Frankfurt and Johannesburg would be increased to five flights a week from April.
Added to this are the existing three weekly flights operated by the Lufthansa subsidiary Swiss between Zurich and Johannesburg.
For the next few months, the group expects bookings to be up to 50 percent higher than in the previous year, which was marked by restrictions.
After restrictions on travel due to a new coronavirus variant, Lufthansa had drastically reduced its South Africa flights at the beginning of the year.
Because of this more contagious variant, the federal government classified the Cape State as a corona risk area with particularly dangerous virus mutations at the beginning of February.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, a good 1.5 million infections have been registered in the most numerically affected African country and around 51,500 people have died as a result.
However, the number of new infections has fallen sharply in the past few weeks from just under 22,000 per day to around 1,000 cases.
The government therefore lifted most of the restrictions.
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According to the pan-African health organization Africa CDC, a sharp decline in new infections has been recorded across the continent for weeks.
A total of around four million infections have been documented on the continent - almost 107,000 people have died from the consequences so far.
According to experts, the number of unreported cases on the continent with its 1.3 billion people could be higher.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210317-99-855367 / 2