SA passes 10-million mark for number of Covid-19 tests done

SA hit a significant milestone on Wednesday night, as the 10-million mark for the number of Covid-19 tests was passed.

There had been a total of 1,553,609 cases confirmed across the country by Wednesday night since the start of the pandemic, health minister Dr Zweli Mkhize said — and this from 10,020,025 tests conducted to date.

Of these, 24,594 were completed in the past 24 hours, with 756 of them coming back positive. This is a positivity rate of 3.07%.

Mkhize also reported that 79 more Covid-19 related deaths had been reported in the past 24 hours. Of these, 25 were in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, 18 in the Free State, six in Mpumalanga, four in the Western Cape, and one was in the Eastern Cape. There were no deaths recorded in Limpopo, the North West or the Northern Cape.

This means that 53,111 fatalities have been recorded since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

To date, 1,479,821 recoveries have been recorded (at a recovery rate of 95%) and the number of health-care workers vaccinated so far is 278,909.

TimesLIVE