A simple graphical peek into the SA COVID-19 statistics
Mayy12, 2020
This webpage intends to visualize the COVID-19 South Africa statistics from publicly available datasets. The first recorded positive case in South Africa was reported on 5 March 2020
in the province KwaZulu Natal from a patient who had recently arrived from a trip to Italy (NICD).
The provincial, age and gender data was obtained from the NICD website and the national data from the Novel Corona Virus Dataset
on Kaggle.
The source code to make the plots and the datafiles currently sits in the SA COVID-19 Github repo.
On March 23, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a 21 day nation-wide lockdown with effect from midnight on Thursday 26 March, just three weeks after the report of the first COVID-19 case (SA News).
As seen on the plot above, on the day of announcement (23 March), the number of COVID-19 cases stood at 408, a considerable increase in the number of infection in a space of a week. The lockdown came as an effort to curb the rapid spread of the virus in the country.
Two weeks into the lockdown, the president announced an extension of the lockdown on April 9, which would now add two more weeks to the initially proposed three weeks.
The first COVID-19 death in South Africa was reported on the 27th of March, nine hours into the beginning of a nation-wide lockdown.
Health minister, Dr Zweli Mkhize announced that the first recorded COVID-19 death was a 48-year-old woman from the Western Cape Province
(SA News). The death toll stood at nine at
the end of the first month since the first case was reported but it soon peaked to over 60 two weeks after that as seen on the
plot above.
So far the total number of tests conducted for COVID-19 stands at 356 067 with 2.9% of them testing positive. 33.5% of the patients
who tested positive have recovered. The national death rate currently stands at 1.97%, with 36 patients currenty in ICU.
