As of November 18, 2022, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Africa amounted to around 12.7 million, which represented around two percent of the infections around the world. By the same date, coronavirus cases globally were over 640 million, deaths were over six million, while approximately 620 million people recovered from the disease. On the African continent, South Africa was the most drastically affected country, with more than 3.6 million infections.

The African continent fighting the pandemic  

The African continent first came in contact with the coronavirus pandemic on February 14, 2020, in the northernmost part, particularly Egypt. Since then, the different governments took severe restrictive measures to try to curb the spread of the disease. Moreover, the official numbers of the African continent are significantly lower than those of Europe, North America, South America, and Asia. Nevertheless, the infectious disease still managed to have its effects on several countries. South Africa had the highest number of deaths. Morocco and Tunisia, the second and third most affected in Africa, recorded 16,002 and 27,824 deaths, respectively, while Egypt registered at 24,132 as of March 02, 2022.

The light at the end of the tunnel  

Although the African countries still have a long way to fully combat the virus, vaccination programs have been rolled out in the majority of Africa. Also, according to a survey, public opinion in several African countries shows a high willingness to be vaccinated, with Ethiopia having numbers as high as 94 percent. As of March 2022, Egypt was the country administering the highest number of vaccine doses, however, Seychelles had the highest per rate per 100 people .

On March 6, 2021, confirmed cases of coronavirus COVID-19 on a single day in South Africa amounted to 8,078. Total cases reached 3,684,319, which is the highest number of confirmed cases compared to other African countries. As of the same date, there were 99,543 casualties and 3,560,217 recoveries in the country.

The most affected country in the continent

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the continent, starting in Egypt on February 14, 2020, South Africa has been harshly affected, quickly becoming the worst-hit country in Africa. Gauteng, the province with Johannesburg as its capital, was the most affected regionally with over 1.2 million cases as of early March, 2022. As well as its health effects, the pandemic had a strong impact on businesses with nine out of ten businesses operating in different industries claiming that the turnover was below the normal range they used to receive as of April 2020.

Vaccination efforts

Countries around the world are racing to get their populations vaccinated to be able to go back to normal. As the fourth wave hits South Africa in December 2021, and as the different stronger variants emerge, the country is also trying to vaccinate its population faster to minimize the severe health effects. After facing a harsh start to its vaccination program due to the ineffectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine to the Beta variant also known as B.1.351, on May 17, 2021, South Africa began the second phase of its vaccination program, opening it for people who are 60 and over. Previously, the so-called Sisonke Program was rolled out as the first phase to ensure the vaccination of the health workers protecting them from the pandemic. As of March 6, 2022, Gauteng was the region with the highest number of vaccinated individuals followed by Western Cape with around 9.02 million and five million inoculations, respectively.

As of March 06, 2022, overall coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in South Africa reached its highest at 3,684,319 infections. It was also the largest volume of confirmed cases compared to other African countries. Regionally, Gauteng (Johannesburg) was hit hardest and registered 1,196,591 cases, whereas KwaZulu-Natal (Durban) and Western Cape (Cape Town) counted 653,945 and 642,153 coronavirus cases, respectively. In total 23,245,373 tests were conducted in the country. Total recoveries amounted to 3,560,217. On December 12, 2021, the highest daily increase in cases was recorded in South Africa.

Economic impact on businesses in South Africa

The coronavirus pandemic is not only causing a health crisis but influences the economy heavily as well. According to a survey on the financial impact of COVID-19 on various industries in South Africa, 89.6 percent of businesses indicated to see a turnover below the normal range. Mining and quarrying industry was hit hardest with nearly 95 percent of all companies seeing a decrease in turnover, whereas the largest share of businesses experiencing no economic impact are working within the real estate sector and other business services. As a response to the coronavirus, laying off workers in the short term was the most common workforce measure that businesses in South Africa implemented. 36.4 percent of businesses indicated to have laid of staff temporarily, and roughly 25 percent decreased the working hours. Approximately 20 percent of the surveyed companies, on the other hand, said no measures have been taken.

Business survivability without any revenue

Due to the measures taken by the government to prevent the coronavirus from spreading too fast, many businesses had to close its doors temporarily. However, if the coronavirus would leave them without any form of revenue for up to three months, eight out of ten businesses in South Africa predicted (in April 2020) they will go bankrupt. Just 6.7 percent said to survive for longer than three months without any turnover.

South Africa recorded 102595 Coronavirus Deaths since the epidemic began, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In addition, South Africa reported 4072533 Coronavirus Cases. This dataset includes a chart with historical data for South Africa Coronavirus Deaths.

As of November 18, 2022, the overall deaths due to coronavirus (COVID-19) in Africa reached 257,984. South Africa recorded the highest number of casualties. With over 100,000 deaths, the country accounted for roughly 40 percent of the total. Tunisia was the second most affected on the continent, as the virus made almost 30,000 victims in the nation, around 11 percent of the overall deaths in Africa. Egypt accounted for around 10 percent of the casualties on the continent, with 24,600 victims. By the same date, Africa had recorded more than 12 million cases of COVID-19.

In past 24 hours, South Africa, Africa had N/A new cases, N/A deaths and N/A recoveries.

COVID 19 Data for South Africa created, maintained and hosted by DSFSI research group at the University of Pretoria

Disclaimer: We have worked to keep the data as accurate as possible. We collate the COVID 19 reporting data from NICD and South Africa DoH. We only update that data once there is an official report or statement. For the other data, we work to keep the data as accurate as possible. If you find errors let us know.

See original GitHub repo for detailed information https://github.com/dsfsi/covid19za

South Africa COVID-2019: Number of Cases: To Date: CC: Unallocated data was reported at 1.000 Person in 01 Feb 2023. This stayed constant from the previous number of 1.000 Person for 25 Jan 2023. South Africa COVID-2019: Number of Cases: To Date: CC: Unallocated data is updated daily, averaging 0.000 Person from Mar 2020 (Median) to 01 Feb 2023, with 876 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 403.000 Person in 31 Mar 2022 and a record low of 0.000 Person in 14 Dec 2022. South Africa COVID-2019: Number of Cases: To Date: CC: Unallocated data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Department of Health. The data is categorized under High Frequency Database’s Disease Outbreaks – Table ZA.D001: South African Department of Health: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-2019).

As of March 06, 2020, the aggregate number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in the southernmost region of the African continent corresponded to 4,207,612. South Africa accounted for majority of the cases in the sub-region, with around 87.6 percent of the infected individuals within the country's borders. Botswana reported roughly 264 thousand cases.

Identifying changes in the reproduction number, rate of spread, and doubling time during the course of the COVID-19 outbreak whilst accounting for potential biases due to delays in case reporting both nationally and subnationally in South Africa.

As of November 16, 2020, a total of 17.577 COVID-19 related casualties were registered in South Africa. Some 14.1 percent of the deaths fell within the age group of 60 to 64 years with, whereas 12.6 percent of whom were aged 55 to 59 passed away due to the diseases caused by the coronavirus. Confirmed coronavirus cases per region in South Africa illustrated Gauteng was hit hardest. As of January 15, 2021, the region with Johannesburg as its capital registered 350,976 individuals with COVID-19 , whereas KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape had dealt with less cases.

The global economy has been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many countries are experiencing a severe and destructive recession. A significant number of firms and businesses have gone bankrupt or been scaled down, and many individuals have lost their jobs. The main goal of this study is to support policy- and decision-makers with additional and real-time information about the labor market flow using Twitter data. We leverage the data to trace and nowcast the unemployment rate of South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we create a dataset of unemployment-related tweets using certain keywords. Principal Component Regression (PCR) is then applied to nowcast the unemployment rate using the gathered tweets and their sentiment scores. Numerical results indicate that the volume of the tweets has a positive correlation, and the sentiments of the tweets have a negative correlation with the unemployment rate during and before the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the now-casted unemployment rate using PCR has an outstanding evaluation result with a low Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Symmetric MAPE (SMAPE) of 0.921, 0.018, 0.018, respectively and a high R2-score of 0.929.

In past 24 hours, South Sudan, Africa had N/A new cases, N/A deaths and N/A recoveries.

Daily Covid-19 cases and cumulative cases (infections, recoveries, deaths) in South Sudan

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, the demands on the health care system will intensify and will result in critical shortages of resources (hospital beds, intensive care unit (ICU) beds, ventilators, medical workforce), particularly in the public sector. In such a context, it becomes imperative that resources are used in the most humane ways possible; and that decisions about resource allocation are made carefully and with compassion. While there are a number of key resource allocation decisions that need to be made in the response to COVID-19, this rapid economic evaluation responds to the question: What is the cost-effectiveness of ICU care versus treatment in general ward in supporting severe COVID-19 cases? Given the emergent nature of COVID-19 and the huge uncertainty in key parameters, a simple excel-based model is provided. This simplicity is designed to facilitate understanding. In addition, the framework allows for parameters to be varied and ultimately updated as sufficient local data become available.

BackgroundThe South African COVID-19 Modelling Consortium (SACMC) was established in late March 2020 to support planning and budgeting for COVID-19 related healthcare in South Africa. We developed several tools in response to the needs of decision makers in the different stages of the epidemic, allowing the South African government to plan several months ahead.MethodsOur tools included epidemic projection models, several cost and budget impact models, and online dashboards to help government and the public visualise our projections, track case development and forecast hospital admissions. Information on new variants, including Delta and Omicron, were incorporated in real time to allow the shifting of scarce resources when necessary.ResultsGiven the rapidly changing nature of the outbreak globally and in South Africa, the model projections were updated regularly. The updates reflected 1) the changing policy priorities over the course of the epidemic; 2) the availability of new data from South African data systems; and 3) the evolving response to COVID-19 in South Africa, such as changes in lockdown levels and ensuing mobility and contact rates, testing and contact tracing strategies and hospitalisation criteria. Insights into population behaviour required updates by incorporating notions of behavioural heterogeneity and behavioural responses to observed changes in mortality. We incorporated these aspects into developing scenarios for the third wave and developed additional methodology that allowed us to forecast required inpatient capacity. Finally, real-time analyses of the most important characteristics of the Omicron variant first identified in South Africa in November 2021 allowed us to advise policymakers early in the fourth wave that a relatively lower admission rate was likely.ConclusionThe SACMC’s models, developed rapidly in an emergency setting and regularly updated with local data, supported national and provincial government to plan several months ahead, expand hospital capacity when needed, allocate budgets and procure additional resources where possible. Across four waves of COVID-19 cases, the SACMC continued to serve the planning needs of the government, tracking waves and supporting the national vaccine rollout.

Context

Late in December 2019, the World Health Organisation (WHO) China Country Office obtained information about severe pneumonia of an unknown cause, detected in the city of Wuhan in Hubei province, China. This later turned out to be the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) of the coronavirus family. The disease causes respiratory illness characterized by primary symptoms like cough, fever, and in more acute cases, difficulty in breathing. WHO later declared COVID-19 as a Pandemic because of its fast rate of spread across the Globe.

Content

The COVID-19 datasets organized by continent contain daily level information about the COVID-19 cases in the different continents of the world. It is a time-series data and the number of cases on any given day is cumulative. The original datasets can be found on this John Hopkins University Github repository. I will be updating the COVID-19 datasets on a daily basis, with every update from John Hopkins University. I have also included the World COVID-19 tests data scraped from Worldometer and 2020 world population also from [worldometer]((https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/).

The datasets

COVID-19 cases covid19_world.csv. It contains the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases from around the world since January 22, 2020, as compiled by John Hopkins University. covid19_asia.csv, covid19_africa.csv, covid19_europe.csv, covid19_northamerica.csv, covid19.southamerica.csv, covid19_oceania.csv, and covid19_others.csv. These contain the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases organized by the continent.

Field description - ObservationDate: Date of observation in YY/MM/DD - Country_Region: name of Country or Region - Province_State: name of Province or State - Confirmed: the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases - Deaths: the number of deaths from COVID-19 - Recovered: the number of recovered cases - Active: the number of people still infected with COVID-19 Note: Active = Confirmed - (Deaths + Recovered)

COVID-19 tests `covid19_tests.csv. It contains the cumulative number of COVID tests data from worldometer conducted since the onset of the pandemic. Data available from June 01, 2020.

Field description Date: date in YY/MM/DD Country, Other: Country, Region, or dependency TotalTests: cumulative number of tests up till that date Population: population of Country, Region, or dependency Tests/1M pop: tests per 1 million of the population 1 Testevery X ppl: 1 test for every X number of people

2020 world population world_population(2020).csv. It contains the 2020 world population as reported by woldometer.

Field description Country (or dependency): Country or dependency Population (2020): population in 2020 Yearly Change: yearly change in population as a percentage Net Change: the net change in population Density(P/km2): population density Land Area(km2): land area Migrants(net): net number of migrants Fert. Rate: Fertility Rate Med. Age: median age Urban pop: urban population World Share: share of the world population as a percentage

Acknowledgements

1. John Hopkins University for making COVID-19 datasets available to the public: https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/tree/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_daily_reports
2. John Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
3. COVID-19 Africa dashboard: http://covid-19-africa.sen.ovh/
4. Worldometer: https://www.worldometers.info/
5. SRk for uploading a global COVID-19 dataset on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/sudalairajkumar/novel-corona-virus-2019-dataset#covid_19_data.csv
6. United Nations Department of General Assembly and Conference Management: https://www.un.org/depts/DGACM/RegionalGroups.shtml
7. wallpapercave.com: https://wallpapercave.com/covid-19-wallpapers

Inspiration

Possible Insights 1. The current number of COVID-19 cases in Africa 2. The current number of COVID-19 cases by country 3. The number of COVID-19 cases in Africa / African country(s) by May 30, 2020 (Any future date)

Projections of national cases, deaths and admissions needed at select dates.

As of June 7, 2021, a total of 57,063 COVID-19 related casualties and 1,581,540 recoveries were registered in South Africa. Western Cape registered 11,881 casualties and 279,984 recoveries in total, closely followed by Eastern Cape with only 208 casualties less and 185,995 recoveries.

Analyzing the confirmed coronavirus cases per region in South Africa, Gauteng was hit hardest. As of June 7, 2021, the region with Johannesburg as its capital registered 476,514 cases of COVID-19.

Countrywise vaccination status at the onset of the 3rd and 4th waves.