The epicentre of South Africa’s coronavirus outbreak has switched from the Western Cape Province to the country’s industrial heartland of Gauteng Province with 75,000 confirmed cases, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said on Thursday.
This figure accounts for a large proportion of the 224,665 total confirmed cases nationwide, making the region the epicentre of the disease in South Africa, Mkhize said.
The new figures bring South Africa’s COVID-19 death toll to 3,602, with the number of recoveries put at 106,842 people, or 47.5 percent of the cases, he added.
According to the minister, some 1,944,399 tests have been completed since the March 2020 outbreak of the pandemic in the country, with 36,867 tests done in the last 24 hours alone nationwide.
South Africa has mobile testing vans which travel to rural areas to conduct the tests, apart from the foot soldiers who conduct door-to-door community visits – perhaps the only African country to do so – thereby having one of the greatest numbers of confirmed cases on record in Africa.
Africa has registered over 10,000 deaths from the pandemic, while globally some 539,906 people have succumbed to the disease that originated from the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, the World Health Organisation has said.
NM/jn/APA