{"id":13,"date":"2020-08-24T05:16:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-24T05:16:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2025-12-09T09:14:57","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T07:14:57","slug":"south-african-covid-19-deaths-in-context","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/2020\/08\/south-african-covid-19-deaths-in-context\/","title":{"rendered":"South African COVID-19 deaths in context"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&nbsp;I was curious this morning, so I spent some time digging for context to the numbers we&#8217;re constantly seeing ticking up on our reports these days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The following chart shows this context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Deaths in South Africa\" aria-label=\"Bar Chart\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-jUa9V\" src=\"https:\/\/datawrapper.dwcdn.net\/jUa9V\/2\/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"border: none;\" width=\"634\" height=\"376\" data-external=\"1\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As always, it&#8217;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&#8217;ve used their attribution of the underlying causes<sup>\u2020<\/sup>, Table 4.16 on p58 and also show the lumped &#8220;All non-natural causes&#8221; 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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Road fatalities are always quite worrying to me &#8211; I don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Some additional notes are in order to establish more context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>I haven&#8217;t normalised by population, mainly because these numbers involve yet another dive into the data sets for South Africa.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The COVID-19 numbers are for a partial year, not for a whole year<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The influenza and pneumonia numbers do not include any active measures like lockdown or mask wearing.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Many of these numbers are not directly comparable in terms of mechanism, and the number for murder for instance would be included in the &#8220;All non-natural causes&#8221; number if I were designing this correctly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\nMy personal conclusion from this is that COVID-19 deaths are significant when compared to these other causes of death.\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Sources<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<div>\n<ol style=\"text-align: left\">\n<li>StatSA <a href=\"http:\/\/www.statssa.gov.za\/?page_id=1854&amp;PPN=P0309.3&amp;SCH=7914\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">P0309.3 &#8211; Mortality and causes of death in South Africa: Findings from death notification, 2017<\/a> (Published March 2020)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.worldometers.info\/coronavirus\/country\/south-africa\/\">Worldometer corona tracker<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Dept of Transport <a href=\"https:\/\/www.arrivealive.co.za\/documents\/State%20of%20Road%20Safety%20Report%202019.pdf\">State of Road Safety Report: Calendar January &#8211; December 2018<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Africa Check <a href=\"https:\/\/africacheck.org\/factsheets\/factsheet-south-africas-crime-statistics-for-2019-20\/\">FACTSHEET: South Africa&#8217;s Crime Statistics for 2019\/20<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: left\">Footnotes<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<div>\u2020&nbsp;<span style=\"font-family: Arial;font-style: italic;font-weight: 700\">Underlying cause of death&nbsp;<\/span><span style=\"font-family: ArialMT\">(previously known as primary cause) is the disease or injury that initiated the sequence of events leading directly to death; or the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced the fatal injury. [1]<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;I was curious this morning, so I spent some time digging for context to the numbers we&#8217;re constantly seeing ticking up on our reports these days. The following chart shows this context. As always, it&#8217;s hard to get recent statistics for South Africa. I started with the top 10 natural causes of death in South [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":272,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}