A backlog of 506 COVID-19 deaths registered by health department
Updated | By Gcinokuhle Malinga
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.
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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.
READ: Durban beaches reopened, waters deemed 'pollution-free'
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.
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