AngloGold Ashanti’s Mponeng mine in South Africa has been temporarily closed after 164 workers tested positive for the coronavirus, the gold miner said in a statement on Sunday.
AngloGold Ashanti, which also operates mines elsewhere in Africa, South America and Australia, said it had conducted 650 tests at Mponeng since detecting the first case of the virus there last week, and 164 employees had tested positive with only a handful of tests left to process.
“As a precautionary step, and after discussions with the regulator, operations… have been temporarily halted on a voluntary basis, to complete contact tracing and to again deep clean and sanitize the workplace and key infrastructure,” the statement said.
The statement followed an announcement by a provincial health department earlier on Sunday that underground operations at the mine would be closed until further notice after 53 workers had tested positive.
Like all South African mines, Mponeng, which employed an average of 5,051 people including contractors in 2019, was permitted to return to operating at 50% capacity in April when the lockdown, one of the world’s most restrictive, was eased.
