A backlog of 506 COVID-19 deaths registered by health department
South Africa’s Covid-19 death toll has shot up by 551, but the Health Department says 45 people diagnosed with coronavirus, succumbed to the disease in the last 24 hour period.
The other fatalities are historic deaths.
Spokesperson Foster Mohale says audit exercises conducted by provincial departments have registered a backlog of 506 COVID-19 deaths.
"Provinces like the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal account to 476 historical combined deaths in patients with documented SARS-Cov-2 infection.
The identification of these historic deaths is part of the process to align the provincial death line list with excess deaths.
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The provincial COVID-19 dashboards reflect COVID-19 deaths by date of death rather than by date reported and provide the most accurate trends in deaths in patients with documented SARS-CoV-2 infection.
This brings the number of lives lost during the pandemic to 92-thousand 1-hundred and 12. The country's picked up over 9-thousand 8-hundred new infections. Over 15-and-a-half-million people are fully vaccinated against Covid-19.
