Category: data

We are in the process of moving most of these charts over to our new districts pages. You can find the new Gauteng page here. This page will not be removed but will be out of date when we stop updating it.

by Gemma Gatticchi

To help people keep track of Covid-19 cases in the districts where they live and work, we have collected as much district level data as we could find.

This post contains the data for Gauteng and its five districts. It will be updated daily (or as often as we are able to source data). Unallocated cases are not included in the charts below.

R₀ is on everyone’s lips these days, and it is a critical measure of the epidemic that guides predictions and policies. Yet how R works is widely misunderstood and this leads to inappropriate conclusions. I hope this article will clarify some misunderstandings. But I must emphasise the examples here are for the purpose of illustrating how R works, and are not accurate predictions of how the epidemic will actually evolve in South Africa.

Yesterday evening South African president Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the nation for the first time in 20 days. In his speech (in full here) he referenced mistakes that had been made and promised to do his best to rectify these. He also spoke about the need for transparency and he said government was committed “to continue to be forthright on the state of the pandemic. You want to know when things are bad, and be told when they could get worse,” he said.

While we acknowledge the work that has been done by the president and his government in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, there are areas which we feel need to be addressed. These are primarily data-access issues that we, and others, have been grappling with since the first case of coronavirus was detected in South Africa.

We are painfully aware of the limitations of the publicly available Covid-19 data in South Africa and of the dangers inherent in any Tom, Dick or Harry making predictions based on that limited data.

We haven’t added much provincial- and district-level information to our Coronavirus in SA dashboard yet, mainly because we weren’t sure if we’d get regular information from the department of health. We’ve made charts that we’ve had to remove after a couple of weeks because the data dried up. We’re in the process of adding more detailed provincial charts to the dashboard, but in the meantime, here’s a summary of the data we’ve collected so far.

A large number of the emails we’ve received over the past few weeks have been asking us to compare tests done per day with positive tests per day. Many people have sent in their own charts to show us what they mean. This is why we’ve taken so long to include one of these charts in the dashboard.

When we started the Coronavirus dashboard in mid-March 2020 we didn’t have any specific plans. We were just messing around with the data we could find and seeing what we could produce. We didn’t expect it to become nearly as popular as it has.