Brazil, a country very similar to South Africa in many respects, has had a total of 10 500 deaths from COVID so far. One big difference is that Brazil has 210 million people, roughly 3.5 times the population in SA.

For context, we have more than 25 000 deaths from TB annually.

Mentioned before weeks back but it’s worth reinforcing now, median age of a country appears to be a good if loose predictor of poor COVID outcomes. The median age is 33 in Brazil and 27 in South Africa. Hard to see SA breaching 10 000 COVID deaths.

This isn’t a hard prediction, before all the screenshotting dunkers get excited. It’s just an interesting way of viewing a single variable as a possible predictor especially now that we have more data. If you ‘model’ solely on this you get a range of deaths from 3000 - 12 000.