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11 May, 2022
After a month of short working weeks – really April should just be a month-long holiday – we are back with a new newsletter.
In early April we made a decision to close down our main coronavirus dashboard. Shortly after that new Covid cases began to rise and it looked like a fifth wave was starting. Fortunately, we didn't completely stop collecting Covid data so while we aren't planning on restarting the dashboard we have been able to keep tracking data live on The Outlier Covid tracker. For now, that will be the focus on data collecting efforts. You can see the data here:
The old dashboard is still here for reference: Coronavirus dashboard
What's in this week’s newsletter?
- Fifth Wave, here we go again
- +450 hours of loadshedding already this year
- Salaries of top bureaucrats
- Popular baby names in South Africa
- Price of cooking oil hits a new high
- Moroccan football clubs are on top
- Inside Media Hack: 5 reasons to switch to OpenRefine & a big list of data resources
- Quiz
🦠 Fifth wave, are we there yet?
The number of daily confirmed cases of Covid-19 has started to rise sharply again, but has a new wave begun?
There are three ways of looking at this, according to Professor Mosa Moshabela, the deputy vice-chancellor of research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in a Department of Health media briefing recently:
- The first indicator that a new wave has started is when cases reach five per 100,000 population.
- The second is when weekly cases pass 30 per 100,000. Both of those thresholds were breached in the last week of April.
- The third indicator is when the seven-day moving average of new cases exceeds 30% of the peak of the previous wave.
The peak of the fourth wave was 20,791 on 17 December 2021. Thirty percent of that is 6,237.
South Africa tipped over that edge on Sunday 7 May, when the seven-day moving average reached 6,282.
But, on a provincial level, only KwaZulu-Natal has reached the 30% mark so far. The charts below show the 30% mark for South Africa and each of the provinces.
In case you missed it. After 110 weeks of collecting Covid-19 data, we decided to do something special with all the numbers we've collected by visualising Two years of Coronavirus in South Africa.
🔌 +450 hours of loadshedding already this year
Thanks to our friends at EskomSePush, we know how many hours South Africans have sat in the dark in 2022.
At the end of April, South Africans had experienced 458 hours in darkness (equivalent to 19 days) in 2022 alone. This is not nearly as bad as 2015 and 2020, but if things continue, 2022 could be competing for the top spot of most days without power.
PS. If you need reliable loadshedding data to plan for your business check out the new EskomSePush business API. (This is not an advert, we're just supporters of their great work.)
It's not like loadshedding hasn’t been a national issue for a while. We documented the effect of loadshedding at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 here.
Our worst bout of loadshedding was 2015 when we had 1,358 hours of blackouts, equal to 57 days. But do you know which day of the week had the most loadshedding in 2021? We dug into the data for this enlightening quiz.
💰 Which municipal managers earn the most?
Municipal managers are the highest-paid bureaucrats in a municipality. They work to implement the policies and projects outlined by the mayoral council on a five-year contract.
On average, a municipal manager earned (looking only at their basic salary) just over a R1-million a year in 2020 and 2019, the most recent years for which we have complete data.
But municipal managers in Ekurhuleni, eThekwini, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Kimberley, earned a lot more than other municipal managers.
Read the full story here.
🍼 SA's most popular baby names
What is South Africa’s most popular baby name? StatsSA looked back at 2020 and found that Melokuhle was the favourite for both girls and boys. It means “to uphold beautiful things”.
Most of the other names are also of isiZulu origin. Sihawukele Ngubane, head of performing arts and professor of onomastics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, broke down some of the meanings behind the other names:
Enzokuhle - Do good things (This name has been part of the top four choices for both baby boys and girls since 2017)
Amahle - Beautiful girls
Lubanzi - It is wide, love is deep
🍳 Burning through money
The price of sunflower oil has made headlines over the past week. Using data collected monthly by the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group we looked at the price of five litres of cooking oil from December 2018 to April 2022. It's not just your imagination, 5 litres of cooking oil now costs 125% more than it did in 2019.
⚽️ Moroccan football clubs are on top
No South African club has ever won the TotalEnergies CAF Confederation Cup since its inception in 2004, but Orlando Pirates remains in the running this year, and Moroccan teams have won the tournament six times so far.
💡 Quiz: How well do you know Africa?
In our last quiz, we asked you which South African university was ranked the highest on the top six global university rankings lists? Over 60% of our readers got the answer correct with the University of Cape Town.
This week we're asking:
Which African country has Spanish as one of its official languages?
Click one button below to select an answer:
Our Gemma Gatticchi got frustrated when loadshedding affected her internet connection and hampered her data analysis using Google Sheets. Now she is using OpenRefine to consolidate, clean and filter her data. Read her full article on why she decided to switch from Excel and Google Sheets to OpenRefine when she works with big datasets.
Getting started with data journalism can be tricky, especially if you’re unsure of the best way to start working with your first dataset, or even where to start looking for your first dataset. At Media Hack, we’ve been working with data and journalism for the past five years. In that time the number of tools and learning materials for data journalism has increased exponentially, to the point where there are so many options available that just getting started can be bogged down in decision making.
This list of tools and resources is based on our experience working in this area. It includes tools that we have used, that we regularly use or know to be useful to anyone looking to improve their data journalism.
🗺 Last chance: Learn data visualisation with us
We’re launching in-person training this year... and we’re pretty excited about it.
Our first workshop, How to use charts to tell stories: lessons from a coronavirus dashboard, will be held this Saturday, 14 May, and we're almost booked up, so sign up now if this is your thing.
For more information and to book your spot, visit our events training page here.
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