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“Weekly death reports have revealed a large discrepancy between confirmed Covid-19 deaths in the country and the number of excess natural deaths,” Bradshaw said at the time.
That “large discrepancy” is most apparent when the reported weekly Covid-19 deaths are compared to the excess weekly deaths from natural causes.
The health department previously refused to acknowledge that the official number of deaths is not reported, instead noting that simply because there was a strong correlation, it did not mean that it was true that a high proportion of excess deaths were deaths from Covid- 19 that were “overlooked.” “.
The department told News24 last month that studies would be needed to determine the ratio with certainty. The department was asked if its position remains the same, but had not responded as of this writing.
This graph is a representation of the weekly natural deaths reported by the BDRU / CARe team. The black line, which peaks in July, represents excess deaths or deaths above expected deaths.
Bradshaw and Professor Glenda Gray, Executive Director of SAMRC, have for months made repeated calls to the departments of health and interior and Stats SA to expedite the processing of death notifications, official letters recording the date and cause of death of a person.
Stats SA is currently busy with death notifications from 2018.
Researchers have explained that there could be multiple causes for these 29,000 “unexplained” deaths, including what they call “collateral deaths,” which are deaths as a result of patients being unable to access health care due to reuse of systems. to manage Covid- 19 patients.
READ | Hunting for the Untold Number of Covid-19 in SA: Scientists Urge Steps to Investigate 40,000 Excess Deaths
While it is possible to show the correlation between excess deaths and confirmed cases, confirmed cases are an unreliable metric for tracking the spread of Covid-19, due to changes in the availability and strategy of tests, as well as delays between an infected person, getting a test, receiving the result and having that positive result first reported to the national health department and the time it takes for the department to report those cases.
A more reliable follow-up method, according to several scientists interviewed by News24, is the proportion of tests that are positive. South Africa has implemented a prioritized testing strategy, which means that symptomatic patients who came to hospitals for care were given priority.
But the test numbers have been relatively stable, averaging between 17,000 and 20,000 tests week-to-week for several months.
The graph below tracks the proportion of positive tests, as reported by the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD), versus the excess of natural deaths that the researchers found. It’s clear that as more people tested positive, a strong indicator of a growing epidemic, there would be a greater number of excess deaths in the following days.
In the latest mortality report, released Wednesday, the researchers noted that excess deaths had started to rise again in the Eastern Cape town of Nelson Mandela Bay. The estimated excess deaths on the subway, which is seeing a sharp increase in cases, increased by 200 deaths during the week ending November 3 compared to the previous week.
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