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.
The mine, the deepest in the world, only re-opened in April after being shut under a nationwide lockdown, and had been operating at around 50 percent capacity. It accounted for around 7.4 percent of the company’s total gold production in 2019.
AngloGold Ashanti 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.