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.
Over two years Media Hack collected detailed data on coronavirus in South Africa, and we decided to do something special with all the numbers we’ve collected daily over the past 110 weeks by visualising Two years of Coronavirus in South Africa.