With the onset of winter in South Africa, the time of the “sere and yellow leaf”, I am in a reflective mood as my 74th birthday looms later in the year. I retired from a full-time career as a specialist paediatrician and then a senior government bureaucrat in 2015 having headed a university department of paediatrics and managed two provincial departments of heath in South Africa. Subsequently I have remained busy as a consultant and on the boards of various entities. 2023 marks 50 years since I qualified as a doctor in 1973 and the world around me has changed dramatically since that milestone and as befits that anniversary a…
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COVID-19 Lockdowns … can we learn the lessons?
A recent study published in the South African Journal of Science by Bradshaw et al provides interesting reflections on the number of reported COVID-19 deaths in the four waves of coronavirus infections compared against the total number of excess “natural” deaths during the same periods. While in one province, Western Cape, the ratio between reported COVID-19 deaths and the excess natural deaths was 69% in some other provinces, Mpumalanga and Limpopo respectively, the ratios were as low as 10 and 13%. From this it appears that quality of the provincial data systems varies markedly. The data also indicates that the quality of official COVID-19 reporting may be worsening over time. The…