South Africa is seeing another surge of COVID-19 cases, after the number of new positive infections reported in the region had continued its downward trend despite increased testing, according to South African National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) data. The NICD on Dec. 14 reported 23,884 new COVID-19 cases in South Africa, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 3,204,742. The figure represented a 34.9 percent positivity rate, the institute said, noting that there had been an increase of 599 hospital admissions in the past 24 hours. Just days earlier, on Dec. 11, the NICD reported 17,154 new cases, which was nearly 2,000 down from the 19,018 new cases reported on the day before. Similarly, while the number of daily hospital admissions saw an upward trend from 374 new admissions on Dec. 8 to 507 new admissions on Dec. 10, it dropped to 184 new admissions on Dec. 11. The …