Remembering those uncounted souls who silently died of Covid

It’s the first month of the third year of the pandemic…

It sounds like the start of a sci-fi novel, but it’s the reality we’ve all been living through.

Or quietly dying through, because, as reported, over 290 000 excess deaths had been recorded in South Africa since the first lockdown, which was only meant to last three weeks and then we’d all be fine.

Add these figures into our official Covid death toll, and South Africa has had the second-most deadly pandemic in the world.

This floors me.

On the face of it, South Africa doesn’t look to have fared too badly: the official Covid death toll since March 2020 sits around 160 deaths per 100 000 people, compared to 259 per 100 000 in the United States, or the global winners Peru, with 625 deaths per 100 000.

On Saturday “only” 114 Covid deaths were reported in South Africa. And yet, and yet…

There remain those silent voices, those nearly 300 000 people who died unexpectedly, the vast majority of which can only be attributed to one thing: Covid.

The graphs released by the South African Research Council and University of Cape Town researchers are clear: whenever Covid deaths spiked, then excess deaths spiked too.

On 10 January last year, for instance, when it was reported that 4 027 people had died that week from Covid, excess deaths hit 16 119.

Count them in and suddenly 488 South Africans per 100 000 died of Covid.

Why did these people not get tested, diagnosed? Why were they not in hospital, being treated?

I’m gonna take a stab in the dark here: could it be because testing is prohibitively expensive, unless you had the strength to go queue at a clinic for a free one?

And chances are you might not even know that free tests are available.

It wasn’t widely advertised – not like in Ireland (death rate 122 per 100 000) where everyone knew you could book yourself one anytime, online, for free.

Could it be that the counted Covid dead in South Africa are largely the ones with the resources to get medical care?

Shamefully, it seems so.

So in this, the third year of the pandemic, let us remember those who died unremarked, unnoticed, except by those sitting in the dark beside them, helpless, holding their hand.