[imagesource: Ashraf Hendricks]

South Africa currently has three provinces battling serious COVID-19 outbreaks, and there is even talk of Gauteng returning to some sort of ‘intermittent lockdown’, or ‘Lockdown 2.0’, as others have dubbed it.

That province is currently the epicentre of the pandemic, but the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape are also under siege as hospitals become overwhelmed and healthcare workers are forced to decide who does and does not get potentially life-saving treatments.

Here in the Western Cape, the virus took hold early, due largely to large numbers of tourists passing through and a number of ‘super spreader’ events.

Using the data available thus far, epidemiologist Professor Andrew Boulle has looked at Cape Town’s COVID-19 mortality rate, and in particular certain poverty-stricken areas of the city.

TimesLIVE with more:

Boulle said the Klipfontein health subdistrict already had a mortality rate of about 700 per million people, and in Khayelitsha it was 500 per million.

In the UK, the Covid-19 mortality rate – by far the world’s worst – is 660 per million, and in the US it is 390. In SA as a whole, it is just under 48…

“If the Western Cape were a country and we compared it to other countries, at this point globally we might be one of the countries with the highest daily mortality rates,” he said.

“Some of our most affected subdistricts have mortality of 600-700 deaths per million, and that is still rising.”

It’s feared that the eventual mortality rate could reach 1 500 per million, or even higher, which would place those communities in the same bracket as New York state, Madrid, or Stockholm.

Given that we know which health factors put individuals at increased risk of dying from COVID-19, it’s possible that many other regions across the country could suffer similar mortality rates.

Boulle, who works at the University of Cape Town Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Research, outlined that in areas like the Klipfontein health subdistrict and Khayelitsha, health issues like diabetes, HIV, and TB make the spread of the virus particularly worrying.

Despite comments from Premier Alan Winde regarding the Western Cape reaching its peak, Boulle says that talk is premature:

Explaining why modellers did not believe the Western Cape had reached its peak, Boulle said: “We are still seeing ongoing increases in mortality, even though the rate of change is slowing. We won’t call it a peak until we see mortality coming down robustly…

“In different parts of the Western Cape, the epidemic is taking hold at different times and at different velocities.”

During the conference hosted by Winde, Boulle also presented data that suggests COVID-related deaths in the province may be under-counted:

There is growing evidence that COVID-related deaths are being under-counted.
On this chart, the blue line is the official daily COVID mortality rate in Western Cape; the red star (twice as high) is estimated “excess deaths” — of which the vast majority are likely COVID-related. pic.twitter.com/62F7JqVrel

— Geoffrey York (@geoffreyyork) July 2, 2020

No, posting a screenshot of someone on Facebook talking about how their friend’s uncle passed away and was classified as having COVID-19 doesn’t counter the above.

There are some examples of this happening, but as York points out, “there’s also an orchestrated disinformation campaign by malicious denialists who want to claim that the pandemic is a hoax”.

Ask a healthcare worker at one of the hospitals being pushed to breaking point if they think it’s a hoax.

One of the saddest parts of watching that struggle unfold is how, despite our early and necessary lockdown measures, our government squandered the opportunity to adequately prepare.

In a damning piece on News24, Professor Alex van den Heever, chair in the field of Social Security Systems Administration and Management Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Governance, has laid bare that failure.

It’s well worth a read – do so here.

[source:timeslive