No sign of a third wave...yet

I have been hearing recently about a third wave of South African COVID-19 infections that is imminent or according to some commentators has already started. This is perplexing because I see no evidence of a third wave in the COVID-19 hospital admission statistics that I collect on a daily basis from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) website. A graph for the South African experience in the latest NMG report uses data collected to 17 March 2021 and is set out below:


The graph shows that we have almost reached the levels of COVID-19 admissions that we were experiencing before the second wave started (and the trend is downwards).

I looked at the confirmed COVID-19 cases just to check that this showed a similar pattern to the hospital admissions. The daily reported COVID-19 cases for South Africa is graphed below:


Again, no sign of a third wave of infections and the daily reported infections appear to have reached the levels reported in the trough between the first and second waves.

I will continue to monitor the reported data to look for signs of a third wave. Any talk of a third wave is purely speculative at this stage and I cannot see how anyone can be confident of a third wave until we start to see it in the data. 

For those wishing to see the latest NMG report on this monitoring, you can access it at https://nmg-covid-19.sctechnology.co.za/ 

19 March 2021



Comments

  1. Geoff BaarsMarch 19, 2021 at 11:36 AM

    Thanks Gary - interesting analysis as always. Follow the data (not the emotion)! ;-)

    ReplyDelete

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