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By Citizen Reporter

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Covid-19 data dashboard launched to help public understand virus risks

The dashboard also gives 'metrics to prepare for future outbreaks, and monitoring Covid-19 hospital admissions'.


The South African Covid-19 Modelling Consortium (SACMC) and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) have launched a Covid-19 data dashboard to assist the public to understand the risks of the virus so they can “make educated decisions”.

The SACMC Epidemic Explorer dashboard includes figures and analyses used to monitor the epidemic at the district and provincial level, and identify second waves.

The dashboard also gives “metrics to prepare for future outbreaks, and monitoring Covid-19 hospital admissions”.

“This open access dashboard presents a subset of the metrics used to support the planning efforts of the government of South Africa. The public can use it to assess the Covid-19 risk level in any district in the country. This dashboard is best viewed on a computer. If viewing on a mobile device, zoom in to see plots in detail. If the dashboard is idle for more than 10 minutes, it will time out. Please refresh your browser to load it again.”

The data used for resurgence analysis is from the NICD NMC-SS case linelist and is updated on a weekly basis.

“Case data should be interpreted in conjunction with test positivity, growth rates and other metrics that are not presented here.

“Provincial, district and sub-district case allocations are mapped primarily according to residential address, or alternatively the facility where the sample was collected. Missing data and procedures for extracting and geocoding address data may result in allocation errors, particularly at more granular spatial resolutions [ie, below province level]. While provincial allocations of cases are complete and robust, district data are available for ~87% of cases and sub-district allocations for only ~70% of cases. In order to make the most of available data, the SACMC Epidemic Explorer utilises the laboratory report date to calculate the resurgence metrics.

The number of Covid-19 hospital admissions is may change from day to day as facilities go back and capture historical data.

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“At any given point in time, data on some discharges and deaths are in the process of being updated. Therefore, we have right censored the data by three days to account for this. Furthermore, incomplete data submissions and delays in updating admission and outcome data in the DATCOV system could influence the interpretation of data.”

Compiled by Makhosandile Zulu

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