Facts in Q&A format

Three percent of girls aged 15 to 19 years were pregnant at the time of the 2014 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey. A further 15% had had a live birth, bringing the share of adolescents in this age group who had started childbearing to 18%.At the time, the fertility rate for this age group was 96…

According to the South African Police Service’s crime statistics, the Western Cape recorded 3,975 murders in 2019/20 and the Eastern Cape 3,879.If the population estimates at the end of September 2019 are used to calculate the murder rate, the Eastern Cape had the highest rate at 59.5 murders per…

In 1953, Professor ZK Matthews, then leader of the ANC in the Cape, proposed that a Congress of the People be convened to draw up a Freedom Charter.The Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955 by the Congress of the People – a gathering of more than 2,800 delegates, representing numerous organisations…

A 2006 analysis of teenage fertility trends found that there were “no grounds to believe that young South African girls are deliberately having children in order to access welfare benefits”.According to the research, teenage childbearing had not increased after the grant was introduced in 1998. In…

Cervical cancer develops in the cervix, which “attaches the uterus to the vagina”. The World Health Organization says cervical cancer is almost always linked to sexually transmitted human papillomaviruses (HPV).The fear that HPV vaccines could cause infertility has been linked to the low share of…

The Nigerian government has not released official numbers for ventilators. One unverified estimate, published in the media in March 2020, put the number at “less than 500”. Subsequent additions include 50 ventilators procured through the United Nations. There have also been reported efforts to…

Covid-19 is a respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus.A coronavirus is part of a large family of viruses that cause illness in people and animals. The new coronavirus is the most recently discovered coronavirus. The full name of the virus that causes Covid-19 is severe acute…

The government does not release an average daily death rate for Covid-19. As at 11 July 2020, a total of 184 people had died out of a total of 9,726 infections, bringing the case fatality rate to 1.9%. Three deaths were reported in the preceding 24 hours.

A study, conducted by researchers in China, found that “people with blood group A have a significantly higher risk for acquiring Covid-19 compared with non-A blood groups”.Their finding was based on a comparison of the blood group distribution in 2,173 patients with Covid-19 from three hospitals in…