Accurate data crucial for policy interventions

The failures of the democratic government have been exposed at every turn by the novel coronavirus.

This Covid-19 season has laid bare gross inadequacies and inequities within our public healthcare and education systems, exacerbated the lingering effects of apartheid spatial planning, and made even more crystal clear the ruling party’s propensity to corruption and nepotism — in case anyone had grown dull to the tendencies.

It is no surprise, then, to find that our country’s system of reporting death is also hopelessly inadequate to meet the challenge of a global pandemic.

Researchers found 28,329 more deaths were recorded nationally from May to July on the population register than the average death rate for that period over the past two years plus known Covid-19 deaths. In the Eastern Cape, this excess deaths figure is 7,597.

These figures point emphatically to a far greater devastation wrought within communities by Covid-19 than what is indicated by the official numbers provided by the national health department. It squares with anecdotal accounts from people on the ground — including readers of this newspaper — of instances of infection by the virus and subsequent deaths.

It ought not to be too difficult to improve our knowledge of when and how people die in the country.

The basics of a good death reporting system are there — all who live in this country are obligated to report the death of a loved one to the department of home affairs, which maintains the national population register.

However, home affairs is not represented across the country and especially in deep rural areas, its electronic system is notoriously unstable and its staffers lacklustre at best in performing their essential national service.

It is also important that doctors properly indicate the causes of death on the form submitted to the department.

StatsSA collects the information from home affairs regularly through the year, but only computes and interprets the data on an annual basis, publishing a report on mortality in the country which includes information on causes of death.

There is no reason StatsSA cannot run a weekly data collection and analysis system of the raw data received by DHA, especially if it links up with the researchers — some of them already employed by the government’s Medical Research Council — who have produced the excess mortality reports.

That information is crucial for general public health policy and crisis interventions, as Covid-19 has demonstrated.