Protocol for Reopening Society
< 1 min read PANDA publishes its preliminary Protocol for Reopening Society based on the principles of focused protection as described in the Great Barrington Declaration.
Public Health
A ‘fake news’ boomerang – Daily Friend
6 min read PANDA believes that the people of South Africa will do the right thing if they are empowered with accurate information. This team’s purpose has been to consider all of the science and to separate the good science from the bad and promote the former.
Biznews: Busting Myths about Cases
7 min read We must all be wary of a second wave being manufactured by increases in testing that are presented to us as an increase in cases. It is foolhardy to focus our attention on one disease alone instead of the overall impact of policy choices we make. When we do focus on one disease alone, we should certainly not focus on positive tests but rather on death and hospitalisation data.
Examining Excess Deaths Reporting
10 min read There is a persistent narrative that South Africa’s official COVID-19 death tally is significantly undercounted because reported excess deaths are higher than the official COVID-19 death toll. It is time to dispel the three most prominent myths around South Africa’s excess death reporting.
PandaCast | Why The WHO Was Wrong About Global Death Predictions
< 1 min read What is the Case Fatality Rate and the Infection Fatality Rate and how do they differ? Which data, published by the WHO, sent the world into Covid-19 lockdown and was that a reasonable choice? How accurate were governments’ models predicting COVID deaths in relation to actual deaths? PANDA explains CFR, IFR and takes a look at the current statistics for C-19 mortality.
Five reasons people stopped listening to Covid-19 modellers
9 min read Epidemiological modellers have made themselves irrelevant by producing work that failed to align with reality and they remain unrepentant in the face of overwhelming evidence of their failings. They made themselves irrelevant by choosing to support the hand that feeds them and allowing their work to be used to justify violations of our constitutional rights through illegal lockdowns that destroy lives and livelihoods on a daily basis.
Panda challenges Covid-19 experts to return to ‘reality’
< 1 min read Shayne Krige, a lawyer with Panda, says it helps the government to show a large number of deaths. “To establish that the lockdown regulations are rational, the government has to show, on an ongoing basis, that Covid presents a serious risk. And in order to show that the draconian lockdown measures the government adopted were proportionate to the harm, the number of people who could die needs to be high,” he says.
Is the Western Cape’s Covid-19 infection peak behind us and what do the coming months hold?
< 1 min read Piet Streicher of Pandemic Data Analytics talks to Refilwe Moloto about what we can actually read into announcements by the Western Cape Health authorities that they are seeing signs that infection rates in the province are no longer accelerating.
Excess Deaths Oddities
9 min read The SAMRC report attempts to show that the coronavirus pandemic has led to almost 11,000 fatalities, more than three times the official death count. Our view is that this claim is false and that simple and logical adjustments to the data for known reporting issues cause the excess fatality number to align much more closely with recorded COVID-19 deaths.
Exploring Inter-Country Variation
< 1 min read One of the most interesting features of the COVID-19 outbreak is the stark difference between mortality experience in different countries. No simple and plausible explanations that we are aware of have been advanced.
While our results explain roughly half of the inter-country variability, they appear to be far more robust than the current explanations in circulation. We are hopeful that other researchers will identify factors that can improve our model.