Gold mining company Harmony Gold is targeting the establishment of coronavirus testing facilities at its own premises to speed up the current two-day turnaround time.

“As an industry, we’ve put together a process to get more test facilities on our own premises. At the moment, we do it through private labs because we don’t have the facilities in-house at Harmony Gold,” Harmony CEO Peter Steenkamp said during a conference call covered by Engineering News & Mining Weekly.

However, at the company’s operation at Hidden Valley, in Papua New Guinea (PNG), test equipment had already been secured, Steenkamp said in response to Noah Capital’s Rene Hochreiter.

All mineworkers brought back to work at Harmony’s ramping up of South African mines have been screened at the point of entry.

“We went down to the Eastern Cape to fetch our people as required by the regulations. We screened everybody at the Teba offices.

“People with high temperatures have not been brought back to work. “Many were put through testing, which takes two days. So we take these people into a quarantine facility. The tests come back and those testing negative are free to go underground. None of our people brought back to work has tested positive.

“What we do now is . . . screen everybody on a daily basis and there is also a self-assessment questionnaire that all personnel have to complete every day.

“We want to do a lot more tests [at Harmony], but, unfortunately, our labs are quite congested and, at this point, it takes us two days to get the results back. The percentage of people that we tested after that screening process has not been very high,” Steenkamp said.

In PNG, testing is done at the airport and employees taken offsite are tested: “We test everybody going offsite and test everyone before they get on site. “Whilst the test results are not out, we keep our people in isolation at the pick-up points, typically at the airport, before [taking] them up the hill into the mine.

“In South Africa, we’re trying to get our testing capabilities up much higher and our turnaround times much shorter. “As the disease will be spreading going forward, we need to be very quick at testing and tracking people and have a short turnaround time to determine whether personnel are positive or not positive, so that they can get them back to work.

“[At] the moment], we’re doing that work to put things together. The initiative started last week and we’re trying to speed it up,” Steenkamp added.