It’s been a really weird year and traumatic for so many… we have lost our sense of normality, our incomes, businesses and loved ones. We are all dealing with the most but what I’ve realised is that we all just want this to end. We’re all just trying to find our way through this.
Johannesburg, South Africa (01 June 2021) – Today exactly a year ago, I started reporting on South Africa’s COVID-19 stats.
My aim? To share the data that I believed mattered: Active Cases and Recoveries.
For some reason, our government and mainstream media were focusing on the “total positive cases” number, which when reported sounded like a million people were sick and being hospitalised. It was (and still is) massively disconcerting how we weren’t looking at the numbers that mattered, like who is actually positive RIGHT NOW, and more importantly, who was being hospitalised.
Well, here we are a year later… come rain or shine, hangovers or I don’t feel like it days, I have reported on the stats for a year now (I think I skipped 4 days in total for my mental wellbeing), and it’s been quite a journey.
I have had random people throw their anger at me because they didn’t like the numbers that day, I had people argue with me “for being wrong” when their maths wasn’t too right to begin with, I have even had death threats thrown my way because people called me pro-lockdown or something along those lines (still not sure what that means or why they were targeting me with their fears and bizarre ideas)… but none of that mattered. Not a single negative response has deterred me, and I have continued delivering these important stats for a year now.
Why? Because above everything else, I have received the most amount of love and kindness for helping other people navigate the “noise” of the pandemic. And that’s all that matters.
It’s been a really weird year and traumatic for so many… we have lost our sense of normality, our incomes, businesses and loved ones. We are all dealing with the most but what I’ve realised is that we all just want this to end. We’re all just trying to find our way through this.
And I think the way we do that is by helping each other.
Whether that’s helping people see the stats in a different way, or by wearing a mask to help someone else who has comorbidities or perhaps taking the vaccine to work towards herd immunity or maybe just by being a little kinder to a person who needs it.
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That’s the biggest lesson for me after reporting on the stats for a whole year: We get through this thing by helping each other!
Here’s today’s dashboard but if you want today’s full report… you can click here.
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