Covid-19: How South Africa will test for the virus
6 April 2020
Testing for Covid-19 in South Africa will hopefully be massively increased in the next few weeks. A machine called the GeneXpert, currently used to diagnose tuberculosis (TB), will be used by the state to test for coronavirus.
Minister of Health Zweli Mkhize has expressed concern that not enough testing is being done. “Our testing criteria are reactive and restrictive. This means we don’t have a true picture,” he has said in his daily briefing on the Covid-19 epidemic.
South Africa had conducted over 50,000 tests by 4 April. This compares well to, say, Brazil which has conducted about the same number of tests but has a much bigger population. But our capacity is far behind Australia (nearly 300,000 tests), South Korea (over 460,000 tests) and most European countries.
Also, in the early stages of the epidemic here it was clear who to target: people with symptoms of Covid-19 who were returning from overseas. Now it is much less obvious and we risk missing outbreaks unless we can do much more testing in many more communities.