Every day Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize provides the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases and how many more new cases since the previous day. But how much can we really tell from these numbers?
Every day Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize provides the number of confirmed cases and how many more new cases since the previous day.Confirmed cases are only a fraction of the total number of cases in the country. Maybe the real number of cases is twice or maybe even 10 times the reported cases – we simply don’t know.Unfortunately, in the past 10 days or so the number of tests has declined from a peak of 8 066 on March 27 to 1 225 on April 6.
This would not mean that there is definitely an explosive growth in the number of cases, only that we would be finding more of them. Now, as recent overseas travel has become a less important indicator of possible infections, it is becoming harder to know who to test.Every day from March 23-27 more than 100 new cases were reported in South Africa – from March 28 to April 6 the daily increases were under 100.
By the time South Africa had its 1 000th case, the country had no Covid-19 deaths. All our deaths have come subsequently. This tells us more about how widely each country has tested for the virus than about the deadliness of the virus in the two countries.Testing differences between countries have been well-reported, but accurately tracking Covid-19 deaths is also not straight-forward.
Countries with older populations will likely have more Covid-19 deaths. But so might countries with younger populations but poorer health systems or less healthy populations.
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