South Africa’s TB tests drop over 30% due to COVID-19 – worse outcomes predicted for life-threatening disease

One of South Africa’s foremost tuberculosis (TB) researchers, Dr Francesca Conradie, a principal investigator at the Clinical HIV Research Unit (CHRU), has called for a renewed focus on TB testing in South Africa to help find new TB cases that ‘went missing’ during the Covid-19 lockdown. TB testing, the mainstay of SA’s TB programme, took a severe knock during lockdown which has left many South Africans with undiagnosed TB. “We need to find them,” she says.