The Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize has acknowledged that the country has experienced a spike in COVID-19 related deaths, but has attributed this to “data collation.”
More than 330 people have died from the respiratory disease in the past week, which Mkhize said they had grown concerned over. This is because reports from the Medical Research Council had claimed there were no excess deaths for three weeks in a row.
“We therefore consulted the provinces to ascertain the reason for the increased numbers. We have received reports that the provinces are implementing the recommendations of the MRC to reconcile the data with home Affairs deaths data,” the minister is quoted in The South African as saying.
“In addition, provinces are auditing the deaths data either by mining data from the DATCOV surveillance reports and identifying unreported deaths or auditing the facilities on the ground,” he said.
“We welcome this robust refinement of data collation as it reassures us that moving forward, we exercise precision in our epidemiological surveillance.”
[link url="https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/covid-19-fatalities-deaths-increase-mkhize-explains-why/"]Full report in The South African[/link]
[link url="https://twitter.com/DrZweliMkhize/status/1314308346623733766?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Enews%7Ctwgr%5Etweet"]Health Minister Zweli Mkhize Twitter feed[/link]
Health Department statement
file:///C:/Users/Sally%20Fowler%20Delport/Downloads/health%20media%20statement%208%20october.pdf