On 5 March 2020, South Africa recorded the first positive Covid-19 case. A few days later the first Covid-related death was confirmed in KwaZulu-Natal. Over the next two years the world was ravaged by SARS-CoV-2, or "coronavirus". In South Africa, more than 100,000 deaths were attributed to coronavirus. But the real death toll is likely to be three times higher. Estimates of "excess deaths” show that deaths from natural causes over this two-year period were far higher than expected (see below).
Over two years Media Hack collected detailed data on coronavirus in South Africa.
In the chart below the triangles represent a day's worth of data, the larger the triangle, the more confirmed cases were reported on that day. The colour of the triangle represents the number of reported deaths on a day. The darker the pink, the higher the number of deaths.
Daily Covid-related deaths in the first wave started to peak in late July 2020 and continued to be high until September. The second wave, which was dominated by the Beta variant of the virus, peaked in late January 2021. The largest number of daily deaths of the whole two-year period occurred in January 2021.
Deaths were more evenly distributed throughout the third wave than in the second wave. This is very different to the fourth wave which saw significant testing and an increase in daily cases but relatively low numbers of daily deaths.
Note: The dates for cases and deaths are the dates on which they were reported by the department of health and not necessarily the actual date of test or death.
Officially, 100,000 people died of Covid-related causes over the past two years. But in reality many more are likely to have died as a result of the pandemic. The SA Medical Research Council estimates that there were just over 300,000 "excess deaths", which is the number of deaths by natural causes above the number that would be expected if there wasn’t a pandemic. Most of the excess deaths are likely to have been Covid-related.
In the chart below the dotted white line shows the predicted number of deaths from natural causes based on historical data, the dark pink area shows deaths below the predicted number and the bright pink area represents excess deaths.
