Let's play a game of "pick your narrative" - South Africa version.

According to the SAMRC we now have 59,611 excess natural deaths for 2020 to 15 Dec. Compared to 23,611 "official Covid" deaths for same period.

Some are desperate to believe that all almost 60k deaths are Covid

Let's pull that thread.

That would give us a current Covid deaths per mil of 1,000

This would put us in 9th position globally for countries with populations > 1 million people.

The ranking would look like this:

1. Belgium
2. Slovenia
3. Bosnia & Herz
4. Italy
...

5. North Macedonia
6. Peru
7. Spain
8. UK
9. South Africa
10. USA

Looking at this list by their median age is informative.

All but 3 have a median age over 40. The exceptions are the USA (37.9), Peru (27.5) and South Africa (27.6).

Adjusting for country median age then, Peru and South Africa are clearly the worst performers on earth (assuming 100% of excess deaths in SA are Covid).

It seems to be that the fact that these two countries experienced two of the hardest and longest lockdowns is no coincidence. Don't expect anyone in the mainstream to concede that lockdowns either (i) don't work or (ii) may actually make things worse.

A counter narrative: I believe a significant portion of the excess deaths were caused by our very hard lock down. In this case, South Africa's performance on deaths per mil, using official deaths ranks us around 35th by large countries - which seems par for the course

If the majority of the difference are lockdown deaths, it means our lockdown may have already resulted in up to 25,000 additional deaths.

Regardless of which narrative makes more sense to you (because nobody really knows), South Africa has performed appallingly.

Perhaps before we dish out prestigious awards and "men of the year" accolades to our leaders, it's worth a little introspection first.