If you have questions about the calculations, it is explained in yesterday’s post
As I went to bed last night I received a video, probably viral by now if you’ll excuse the unintended pun, of a man driving down Kayalitsha with hundreds (if not thousands) of South Africa’s youth dancing and having fun in the streets. The disturbing thing was the mocking chanting of “Corona!” as if to challenge this invisible killer to come and get them.
I had to do small inspection late afternoon yesterday in my neighbouring town and driving there I saw even more disturbing scenes: Groups of youth walking and playing in the streets; on a farm a saw roughly 10 workers gathered in a huddle; on the outskirts of town construction workers were going about their business.
Earlier in the day, I stopped at the local Tops! to buy some provisions given that none this will be available at lockdown. I wore a mask and kept a distance of at least 1 metre but ideally more. I was an Alien. Around me, people behaved in their usual daily fashion with little of any cognisance that they, as everybody above mentioned, may be blissfully spreading the disease.
It left me with a sense of sadness. Here I am crunching the numbers and seeing that every day, probably due to this ignorant behaviour, South Africa’s infection rate is going up. I want to emphasis RATE in that last sentence. I am not talking about the increase of 30%+ in infected cases. I am talking about that % increasing.
Also, don’t underestimate that when we tested 1,000 people and found 34 cases (14 March) it was still manageable. Yesterday the tally is on 20,471 tests with 927 positive cases. We are no doubt missing some cases, which is also the hypothesis about Italy’s high death toll (13.2%) as opposed to Germany’s (0.3%). One explanation is that Italy’s testing is not as good as Germany’s and therefore they simply don’t know about all the infected cases. Guess what – with tests becoming a scarce commodity globally we will soon lose track of the infected cases and only begin the measure the fatalities.
My sense of sadness will remain for as long as our nation keeps its head buried in the sand. When the reality of the situation starts to hit home with grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters perished, my sadness will be that I was powerless to prevent the ignorance.
Finally, it is with a bit of a shock that we learned today that the first fatalities are people of 48 and 29 respectively. Let that sink in. No, it is not only old people and no, young people are not immune.
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