Health Minister Zweli Mkhize on Thursday said South Africa had recorded 58,568 Covid-19 infections while the health services have carried out one million tests for the virus.

Mkhize said passing the one-million mark was a milestone and “no small feat”.

“I would also like to thank the labs for all the hard work that is being done now to clear the backlog and improve turnaround times for processing specimens,” he said.

The total number of tests was at 1,028,399. Fifty-two percent were done in the public sector and 48 in the private sector.

Mkhize said South Africa was one of the countries that quickly grasped the importance of a mass testing campaign and to embark on a tracing and tracking programme after the country recorded it’s first Covid-19 case in KwaZulu-Natal in early March.

The National Health Laboratory Services on Wednesday told Parliament’s portfolio committee on health that the backlog in unprocessed specimens had been reduced to around 63,000 and that efforts had been focused in particular on the Western Cape.

The province on Thursday had 63 percent of the country’s confirmed infections with 37,422. The Eastern Cape and Gauteng each accounted for around 13 percent of the national total.

Mkhize said the total number of recoveries in the country was 33,252 or 56.8 percent of those who had contracted the potentially lethal virus. His department was due to update the death toll later in the day.

Source: ANA