I am a man of statistics, so I don’t like to criticise them, but there are times when they are highly dubious.  That in particular has been the case with the coronavirus and all of the statistics we hear on a daily basis.  The accuracy of those statistics depends on a whole host of factors such as what percentage of a country’s population has been tested and how deaths are reported.  If a doctor in a small town reports a whole lot of deaths as a result of influenza or pneumonia incorrectly, none of us will ever know what the real death rate from Covid-19 is other than it cannot be less than whatever the statistics indicate. 

We are in the hands of individuals all over different towns, cities, etc and of course many are going to report that people have died of the complications of tuberculosis or of HIV instead of indicating that this was exacerbated by Covid-19.  In the past week New York City alone has added 3,000 more deaths to its death toll, with some organisations included in the death toll and others are not, indicating that although those people were not tested with hindsight they believe that those deaths were from Covid-19. That is quite a liberal approach and it is probably the correct approach, but many countries will find it rather convenient to not take that approach and only include deaths where the person was tested beforehand, found positive and then died.  While that would be a strict approach to follow just by reading those words you have to know that that is not going to be an accurate approach and will result in an under-count on the death toll.  I suspect that that is what is happening in South Africa because if it is happening in countries like the UK and in America, then you can only imagine that it would be happening, probably to a far greater degree, in South Africa.  As it is, despite what President Trump says everywhere, large numbers of people in different States in America have not been able to be tested, and similar reports have come out of the UK.