The Hard Data The South African Media Does Not Want You to Know

Policy should never be formulated on the basis of anecdotes and emotion.

Why do the propaganda cartoon people always look this? Google `soma`…

Journalists around the world and in South Africa have failed.

They tell stories. They do not investigate.

They spew propaganda. Their corporate structure is enmeshed in the same global system as governments.

I do not trust government statistics. The unemployment rates and inflation rates give the lie to their credibility.

But what is interesting about government statistics and scientific studies is the evidence of contradiction and inconsistency they demonstrate when you actually bother to read them.

South Africa has a daily surveillance report of our hospitals. You can find it on the website of the National Institution for Communicable Diseases (NICD). The information provided is world class, and very user-friendly - despite their bizarre graphic art as seen above. The Soviet propaganda was more aesthetically pleasing!

Yet the media does not bother to read and report on the hard data the NICD produces at taxpayer cost.

We are constantly told that protecting hospital capacity was the raison d`etre for lockdowns and social distancing. Why then do we hear case numbers constantly, and not hospital capacity? Why has there not been relentless focus on why field hospitals were not used - anywhere - during the pandemic?

It may be that this data simply does not agree with the agreed-upon corporate- governmental narrative.

To my mind, the most important data point should be how much capacity is being used up in intensive care. Clearly, with the non-usage of field hospitals such as the one at Nasrec, the ICU beds are the issue.

When looking at any data on covid, one must always remember that we are never told whether a case is being treated for covid, or happens to have covid while they are in hospital for something else. The latter number is not trivial.

There is also a second factor in South African medical stats - there are two health sectors, private and public. Around 9 million people are served by the private sector, the remaining 50 million or so by the public sector.

The private sector has around a ten times better doctor to patient ratio, and approximately four times the amount of money is spent per private patient compared to public patient.

(What is important to note, however, is that the private patient is paying for this care via insurance premiums but is also paying for the public care via taxes. The taxpayer base is smaller than the number of private medical aid numbers, and is very small in comparison to other countries of similar wealth. It is also generally agreed that private health is completely over-priced, but its users are willing to shell out because of how bad public health care is.)

I mention this because, with the above in mind, it is clear that the focus now should be on public ICU capacity. Public patients are underserved; public patients in general cannot social distance or lockdown as they have to travel on taxis; their living arrangements are far more crowded; and users of public health facilities are the ones hardest hit by the lockdown.

In short, if public capacity is coping, then effectively the government rationale for lockdown is null and void…

Here is the unexpected number of how many ICU beds are being used for covid positive patients in the public sector in the entire country, as of the 28th of June 2021:

173.

To break it down by province - Gauteng has 75, the Western Cape has 58, the Eastern Cape has 2, the Free State has 2, KwaZulu-Natal has 5, Limpopo has 7, Mpumalanga has 3, North West has 13, Northern Cape has 8.

It is to be noted that Gauteng has more than double the population of every province except for KwaZulu-Natal, which has approximately 4 million fewer people than Gauteng which has 15 million people, and thus the most health resources.

It must also be noted that billions of rands have been spent, billions donated, to covid relief spending. There has been time to add ICU beds.

We know covid is very serious for a significant number of people. I am not underplaying that. It is not the plague or Aids, but, yes, it is a terrible virus.

But when you are deciding the fate of millions of people, one cannot make decisions based on emotion. That`s how leaders chose to enter World War I. There needs to be a cost/benefit analysis and there needs to be honesty about the fact the limits of what intervention can achieve. We did not ban sex during Aids. Yet here we are, following policies that we are told simultaneously will double starvation worldwide, without thinking it through.

I think that if the people losing their jobs for lockdown knew these ICU numbers, if everybody knew these numbers, we would all have a different attitude to the unprecedented assault on basic freedoms.

But the media will not say these numbers out loud.

Why is that?

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