Sibonisile Mdlozini

Health Minister, Dr Zweli Mkize, said the rate of coronavirus infections in South Africa is lower than expected.

When the first coronavirus outbreak hit South Africa earlier this year, the worst was expected. He said the early lockdown helped delay the rise in infections in most provinces, except the Western Cape.

“Initially, we thought that this was going to be a huge surge in the whole country, starting with Gauteng being the highest, including KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape and so on. The surge didn’t come quite as early as June, like we initially thought it would,” he said.

Mkhize also said that with many people dying at home, there is no telling whether or not their deaths are due to COVID-19. He said the health department will start working with funeral parlours to test bodies for the virus.

“We are going to be encouraging that our department must talk to the funeral parlours, we need to make sure that we can swap them just to get a quick sense of whether they could have had symptoms suggestive of Covid,” Mkhize said.

Picture: Dr Zweli Mkhize/Instagram