Cape Town — A report by South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) has found that Covid-19 patients of people identified as Black African and Coloured are more likely to die in hospital, compared to White people.This comes in addition to factors that increase fatalities like hypertension, diabetes, chronic cardiac disease, chronic renal disease, malignancy, HIV, or tuberculosis.

The country's department of statistics divides the population into Black South African, White South African, Coloured South African, Asian South African, and Other/Unspecified.

The NICD report noted that "race is for the first time reported to have association with" people dying in hospital.

The results were compared to that of studies in the United States which found that Black and Hispanic and/or Latin people faced a higher mortality rate than White people, indicating that people with lower socioeconomic status are at higher risk of the novel coronavirus.

Statistics provided by the NICD report further showed that of the 23,876 Covid-19 patients for whom race was known and were admitted to hospitals, 16,504 (69.1%) were Black African, 2,354 (9.9%) were Coloured, 1,636 (6.9%) were Indian, 3,293 (13.8%) were White and 89 (0.4%) were identified as Other.

Data for the report was compiled using DATCOV, a surveillance system developed by the NICD to monitor Covid-19 hospitalisations around the country.

The system notes that there are limitations on its ability to collect data - for instance, it does not include all hospitals with COVID-19 admissions, deaths outside hospitals and is completely dependent on information submitted by healthcare institutions.

Initiated on April 1, 2020, the system aggregates data submitted by public and private hospitals in all nine provinces of South Africa - Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, North West, Free State, Kwazulu Natal, Gauteng, Limpopo and Mpumalanga.