Interesting COVID-19 stats in South Africa – Who is dying, where they live, and how quickly it spreads
South Africa currently has 40,792 confirmed COVID-19 cases – a record increase of 3,267 cases in the last 24 hours.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize has also revealed the number of COVID-19-related deaths in the country is 848, up by 56 from the 792 deaths reported the day before.
The Western Cape recorded 54 deaths in the past 24 hours, and the total number of recorded cases in the province now stands at 27,006.
The Eastern Cape has the second highest number of cases on 4,936, followed by Gauteng on 4,845, and KwaZulu-Natal on 2,896.
To make more sense of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa, Media Hack has developed a regularly updated coronavirus dashboard.
This dashboard provides an overview of the pandemic in South Africa, including the infection rate, who is infected, and where they live.
The Media Hack COVID-19 dashboard shows that most deaths occur among adults aged between 50 and 80.
It further shows more males than females died due to COVID-19, a trend which is in line with what is seen globally.
The charts below show the number of cases, number of active cases, the total COVID-19-related deaths, and deaths by province, gender, and age.
Confirmed and active cases
The charts below provide an overview of the confirmed and active cases by province and the infections per 100,000 people in a province.
Stats about testing
Media Hack’s dashboard provides excellent insight into the number of tests done and the results of these tests.
This includes the average number of tests per day and the number of positive tests as shown below.
South Africa versus other countries
The charts below show how South Africa’s infection rate, from the first 100 cases, compares with other prominent countries.
R explained
R0 is the number of direct infections generated by an infected person at the start of an outbreak. As soon as the infection takes hold in the community, the number of susceptible people begins to decline, because some have recovered and become immune.
Moreover, various interventions will be implemented, which reduce how many people one individual will infect.
To represent this ever-changing value of the reproductive number, we should use the term Re for “Effective Reproductive Number”: the number of individuals that an infected person will infect at some point after the outbreak has started. Unfortunately, publications often use R0 when they should use Re.
When Re is greater than 1, it means that each infected person infects more than one other person – so the rate of infection increases. If Re is less than 1, it means that not every infected person infects someone else, so over time fewer and fewer people are being infected and the outbreak declines.
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