Mining Weekly reports that according to the Minerals Council SA (MCSA), which was previously called the Chamber of Mines, an estimated 240,000 miners were back at work on 385 large and small mines across SA.
The council’s Tebello Chabana said on Thursday that each and every one of those miners was screened on return to work after lockdown and every miner was screened for the virus prior to going on shift. “If any miner shows any symptoms or is exposed to someone known to be Covid-19 positive they are sent for testing in line with the protocols of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases,” Chabana indicated. He added that the industry continued to find a high rate of asymtomatic individuals or individuals showing only mild symptoms: “In some of the Covid clusters identified in mining, up to 95% of those who tested positive have been asymptomatic and were tested only because of effective tracking and tracing systems in place.” As of Thursday, there were 831 cases of Covid amongst the employees of the MCSA’s 71 members from a total number of 248,000 screened, the organisation’s health head Dr Thuthula Balfour indicated. “We’ve done tests totalling 10,079 and we can report that of the 831, 403 are in Gauteng, 303 in North West, 89 in Limpopo and 19 in Mpumalanga,” Balfour disclosed. The coal sector had fewest at 15.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard at Mining Weekly
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page