No images? Click here 26 August, 2021 Welcome to the second edition of our new Outlier newsletter. It's been just over a month since we went live with our new website (The Outlier) which is the new home for most of our data stories. So please take a look and let us know what you think. For this newsletter we decided to focus on the good news about vaccination rollouts in South Africa because, after 18 months of living in a pandemic, we all need to believe that life will return to something closer to normal soon. Also, if you haven't already seen it, we're very pleased to have worked with Section27 again on a follow-up to our 2018 investigation into pit toilets in Limpopo schools. In this update we look at how many of the schools have taken action to eradicate pit toilets. Scroll down for that story. If social media is your thing you can find us there as well. Connect with us on any of these: South Africa: 11-million doses and countingSouth Africa's vaccination rollout got off to a slow start because of a shortage of vaccines. We had to rely on 500,000 donated Johnson & Johnson doses and the Sisonke study to get it off the ground. But when the rollout really started, on 17 May, it took just 12 days to administer a million doses of the Pfizer two-shot vaccine. On Tuesday 24 August, the Department of Health reported that 11-million doses had been administered. The last million vaccinations were done in a record five days. Vaccinations opened for people aged 18 to 34 on Friday 20 August. The Department of Health's dashboard shows that at least 767,739 people in this age group had been vaccinated by 24 August. More than 13% of adults fully vaccinatedMore good news is that 13% of the adult population (people aged 18 years and older) have been fully vaccinated. That means they've received either two doses of Pfizer or one dose of Johnson & Johnson. Limpopo has vaccinated the biggest portion of its people. Roughly the same proportion of the population has been fully vaccinated with Pfizer (6.8%) and J&J (6.4%). The charts below are updated daily on Bhekisisa's website here. And, no, it doesn't look like we're not about to run out of vaccines. Even though we didn't get as many J&J doses as expected, we have received almost 20-million doses of Pfizer (enough to fully vaccinate 10-million people) and just over 3.6-million doses of J&J. According to the health department's 13 August presentation, another 3.8-million Pfizers and 2.8-million J&Js are expected by the end of this month. By the end of the year, it's estimated that there could be enough doses to vaccinate about 37-million people. How long will it take to vaccinate 40-million people?We've been keeping track of how long it will take to vaccinate 40-million people, which is the health department's target. We made our first vaccine calculator in March, and back then we estimated that it could take 18 years to vaccinate 67% of South Africans. But from 17 May, when the vaccination rollout to the general public began, the average number of vaccines administered daily has picked up from around 3,500 a day to more than 200,000 a day. We recently made a new vaccine calculator that takes into account both one- and two-dose vaccines. The good news is that if we only used one-dose J&J vaccines from now on, we'd reach the target in just under 6 months. Visit the vaccine tracker here. Or click the image below. And if you are looking for the latest Coronavirus data you then you can find it here. Vaccinations in AfricaThere's been much written about vaccine inequality and how Africa is being left behind in the vaccination race. Many African countries were relying on Covax to deliver their vaccines. But the initiative hit a snag when the Serum Institute of India, a major supplier of AstraZeneca to Covax, stopped exporting vaccines. About 4% of Africans have received a dose of vaccine so far, and only 2% are fully vaccinated, according to the Africa CDC. Things started to pick up in July when the United States donated some of its excess Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines and in August the African Union also started to distribute vaccines. Unsafe toilets for school children in a pandemicThree years ago we did a project for non-profit SECTION27 to work out how many schools in Limpopo still used pit toilets. This year we updated the project, piecing together data from 20 different project lists to try to work out at which schools pit toilets had been eradicated since 2018. It was a lot more complicated than we expected. In case you missed itWhen President Cyril Ramaphosa reshuffled his cabinet earlier this month, we decided to look at the ages of the new group ministers and compare them to the old ones. It turns out that they're pretty old: only 10 of them are under 60. Read: Quick take: An age-old problem – SA’s 2021 cabinet Have your say 📢If you've read this far, thank you, and please let us know what you think. Send comments, suggestions, criticisms to data@mediahack.co.za Do you know someone who may be interested in this newsletter? If you don't want to continue to receive this newsletter you can unsubscribe by clicking the button below. We hope you won't, but we understand if you do. This newsletter produced by: |