Facts in Q&A format

The total number of laboratory-confirmed cases stood at 4,011,657 as of 31 Aug 2022. The World Health Organization (WHO) keeps a tally of global confirmed Covid-19 cases, which is updated daily.You can find the numbers per country here and here. ...

According to the Department of Social Development, more people contacted the Gender-Based Violence Command Centre during the first two months of South Africa’s Covid-19 lockdown. The government established the call centre to “provide immediate care, support and counselling to victims of...

While some men reported spending more time caring for children, an analysis of National Income Dynamics Study – Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey data found that a bigger share of women devoted more time to childcare during South Africa's Covid-19 lockdown. In interviews with about 7,000 adult re...

The release of South Africa’s official unemployment numbers for the second quarter of 2020 (April to June) has been delayed. According to an analysis of National Income Dynamics Study – Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey data, women accounted for the bulk of net job losses. This is “because wo...

Dr Jaco Laubscher, a Stellenbosch-based physician, has claimed that Covid-19 “is a vascular problem and not a respiratory problem”.He argues that Covid-19 is a disease that affects blood vessels and not the lungs. Therefore, the way the condition is treated by health professionals should change....

In May, the South African Covid-19 Modelling Consortium estimated that the peak in active Covid-19 cases in South Africa is likely to be somewhere between early July (in a pessimistic scenario) and early August (in an optimistic scenario). The initial lockdown measures and social distancing delayed ...

Two measures are relevant to this question: how many people someone with Covid-19 infects and how long it takes to do so.Experts have calculated the basic reproduction number (R0) of Covid-19 to estimate how contagious the disease is. R0 is the number of people an infected person is likely to infect...

The Burden of Disease Research Unit of the South African Medical Research Council has been using information from the National Population Register and historical data from 2018 and 2019 to estimate the number of deaths that could be expected during 2020. They compare it with deaths registered during...

According to a release from the South African Police Service, there was a decrease. A total of 371 rapes were reported from the start of the lockdown (27 March 2020) to 20 April 2020. In the corresponding period last year (29 March to 22 April 2019), a total of 2,908 rapes were reported....