South Africa’s confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus have crossed half a million, the health ministry said on Saturday, while cases in Africa as a whole approached a million.
Africa’s most industrialized nation recorded 10,107 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Saturday.
“Today South Africa has exceeded the half-a-million mark with a cumulative total of 503,290 confirmed COVID-19 cases recorded,” Heath Minister Zweli Mkhize said in his daily update.
South Africa has the fifth-highest number of cases in the world, behind the U.S., Brazil, Russia and India.
According to the news agency AP, country’s Gauteng province which includes Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city and Pretoria, the capital is the country’s epicenter with more than 35% of its confirmed cases.
More than 17.6 million people around the world have been diagnosed with the new coronavirus. Almost 10.3 million patients have recovered and at least 680,900 have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
