South African COVID-19 deaths in context

 I was curious this morning, so I spent some time digging for context to the numbers we’re constantly seeing ticking up on our reports these days.

The following chart shows this context.

As always, it’s hard to get recent statistics for South Africa. I started with the top 10 natural causes of death in South Africa from StatsSA [1]. I’ve used their attribution of the underlying causes^†, Table 4.16 on p58 and also show the lumped “All non-natural causes” from the same report. Although this document was published in 2020, it only goes up to 2017. Viewing COVID-19 deaths [2] in this light shows it is considerable, even though it is at the bottom of the list. Note that the COVID-19 figures don’t distinguish between underlying or immediate cause and include significant interventions to mitigate their effects when compared to for example the Influenza and pneumonia figure in the chart.

Road fatalities are always quite worrying to me – I don’t think the average South African is worried enough about them. I used the official Dept of Transport report for 2018 [3]. I find it interesting that these numbers are comparable.

I know that people in South Africa are particularly worried about the murder rate, so I added the Africa Check reported numbers for 2019 [4]. Murder occupies a sobering position in the chart.

Some additional notes are in order to establish more context.

• I haven’t normalised by population, mainly because these numbers involve yet another dive into the data sets for South Africa.
• The COVID-19 numbers are for a partial year, not for a whole year
• The influenza and pneumonia numbers do not include any active measures like lockdown or mask wearing.
• Many of these numbers are not directly comparable in terms of mechanism, and the number for murder for instance would be included in the “All non-natural causes” number if I were designing this correctly.

My personal conclusion from this is that COVID-19 deaths are significant when compared to these other causes of death.

Sources