Massive jump in Free State Covid-19 deaths due to 'two-week delay' in reporting

The number of Covid-19 related deaths in the Free State climbed rapidly on Monday night, with 178 new fatalities reported.

This massive jump was due to a “two-week delay” in reporting the deaths, health minister Dr Zweli Mkhize said.

The deaths in the Free State means that 188 Covid-19 related deaths were confirmed since the statistics were last released on Sunday night. Only 10 of them — three in the Eastern Cape, one in KwaZulu-Natal, two in Gauteng, and four from Western Cape — were not in the Free State.

“This brings the total number of Covid-19 related deaths to 16,586,” Mkhize said.

The latest figures mean the number of deaths in the Free State has risen from 838 to 1,016.

Mkhize also announced 903 new cases of Covid-19 in the past 24 hours, taking the national total to 671,669.

The number of new positive infections was from 9,014 tests — a positivity rate of about 10%. In total, 4,152,480 tests have been conducted.

On the sharp rise in the Free State deaths, Mkhize said: “There has been a two-week delay in the reporting of Free State deaths as the province collated data from the various districts and verified this against home affairs data. This is part of efforts to improve the quality of data by aligning information from facilities with home affairs statistics.

“Data from post-mortem swabs also had to be collated and verified. This is in line with the recommendations of the Medical Research Council. The data is now up to date.”

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