South Africa's mass testing hits limits as virus spreads

South Africa's aggressive COVID-19 screening and testing approach is modelled on years of experience fighting tuberculosis and HIV.

"We decided that we shouldn't just wait in hospitals for patients to arrive," said the government's top coronavirus advisor Salim Abdool Karim.

But labs have been struggling to keep up and medical staff say it can now take up to two weeks for test results to arrive, up from an initial two to three days. Health department spokesman Popo Maja admitted that labs were"struggling"."We expected this," he told AFP.Mdlalose sighed in frustration earlier this week as she pulled on protective gear and counted up swab kits to test the 20-odd workers of a community clinic outside Johannesburg.

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