[imagesource: News24]

Officially, as of the latest stats released last night, South Africa’s COVID-19 death toll stands at 88 674.

Of the 2 917 255 recorded cases, just 20 421 are considered active, with 546 considered serious or critical.

However, unless you’re some sort of denialist, we’re also well aware that confirmed cases are just the tip of the iceberg.

One has to look closely at reported excess deaths, which have spiked in correlation with our various waves, to truly understand the number of lives lost.

Writing for The Daily Maverick, Mark Heywood has spoken with experts, like Tom Moultrie, professor of demography and director of the Centre for Actuarial Research at UCT.

Moultrie explained how the numbers are crunched:

…since 3 May 2020, the SA Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Burden of Disease Research Unit had been meticulously recording the number of deaths reported to it by the National Population Register and contrasting this with historical data on deaths from 2014 to 2019.

The actual deaths reported are adjusted upwards by about 15% to take into account deaths of non-South Africans who are not on the population register, plus the fact that the Department of Home Affairs is not notified of every death.

On this basis, the MRC has been able to measure the “excess deaths” (the weekly observed number of deaths above that expected in any given week based on historical data) since the early days of the pandemic.

What those excess death numbers show us, as of October 9, is a total of 264 809 deaths.

That’s a figure that dwarfs the government’s official number of COVID-19 related deaths.

Here’s a clear illustration of the correlation between reported COVID-19 deaths and the number of excess deaths:

Image: The Daily Maverick

Moultrie, along with colleagues from the Centre for Actuarial Research at UCT, recently published a paper stating that the official number “almost certainly under-reports COVID-19 deaths” with the actual number “2,5 to three times higher”.

That also factors in what has been dubbed “collateral deaths”:

What they mean is that although the “vast majority” of excess deaths are due directly to Covid-19, others occur as a result of the “collateral” stress on other health services and programmes caused by lockdowns and severe disruption in routine access to services, that may be caused by events like the closure of Charlotte Maxeke hospital in Johannesburg.

As a result, demographers and actuarial scientists are watching closely to try to see what impact the Covid responses may have in an increase in deaths due to HIV, TB and the delayed care and treatment of non-communicable diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

If you went with a figure of 250 000 and used South Africa’s population as 60 million, you’re looking at one in every 240 South Africans.

Even before South Africa’s third wave hit, Stats SA reported that COVID-19 had seen the average life expectancy at birth for males drop from 62,4 in 2020 to 59,3 in 2021, with females dropping from 68,4 in 2020 to 64,6 in 2021.

In 2021, says Prof Glenda Gray, president of the MRC, COVID-19 has overtaken HIV as the leading cause of death in South Africa.

As much as we have all grown very weary of life under COVID-19, numbers like these serve as a timely reminder that we’re still dealing with a deadly pandemic.

Read the full article here.

[source:dailymaverick]