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.
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.
< 1 min read It’s a catastrophe. The lockdown could kill far more people than the virus.
“What has happened in the last four months is the greatest social injustice in SA’s history since apartheid,” says PANDA co-founder Nick Hudson. “The lockdown is based on bad science, poor modelling and even worse judgment on the part of the government.”
< 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.
< 1 min read South Africa’s epidemiological models have proven to be wildly inaccurate. A new commentary by international modellers explains why Covid-19 models are a poor basis for decision-making, while South Africa’s own modellers try, but fail, to explain themselves.
< 1 min read PANDA is receiving a slew of requests from doctors, hospital administrators and journalists all over the country who had become frustrated with the NICD’s guidance and wanted a steer from us on what they should plan for. We are a small, not-for-profit business staffed by part-time volunteers, and do not yet have the infrastructure to deal with such requests, as much as we’d like to.
< 1 min read The first official prediction of how many ICU beds would be used in the Western Cape by Covid-19 patients, made back in May, overestimated by between 12 times and 16.5 times the critical care beds needed.
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.
< 1 min read A conversation between Nick Hudson, Russell Lamberti and Peter Castleden about the Politics, Philosophy and Economics at play during the Covid-19 crisis in South Africa.
< 1 min read In this second article in our series on the faulty science of South Africa’s modellers, we take up where our first article left off.
By Piet Streicher, Shayne Krige and Nick Hudson
