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Govt drags heels in providing COVID-19 stats, say data journalists

Lebone Mano
By Lebone Mano, junior journalist
Johannesburg, 08 Apr 2020

The Media Hack Collective data journalism initiative’s recently-launched COVID-19 dashboard, which aims to keep the public informed with reliable statistics about local coronavirus infection rates, is experiencing challenges around acquiring data.

In a recent Facebook post, Media Hack managing partner Alastair Otter lobbied for better and more frequently released data from government sources.

Otter said that initially, the national Department of Health and National Institute for Communicable Diseases regularly released verified data that included details such as infected persons’ age, gender and location.

“The problem now is that the data from the department is very limited and unstructured,” he told ITWeb.

Consistency in releasing the data, or lack thereof, is another challenge. “At the moment, the health ministry reports on national data only. Provincial governments report on provincial data; these reports are also irregular and are usually not in sync with the national case numbers. To avoid causing confusion and distrust, we don’t use them.”

Sink or swim

Speaking on a Media Diaries podcast, Media Hack’s other managing partner Laura Grant said: “We’re struggling to get the data we used to get in the beginning. So we’ve decided to change the dashboard and add international graphs to compare South Africa to other countries.

“We’ve got close to 4 000 people who’ve subscribed to our newsletter and I kind of feel an obligation to give them updates.”

The dashboard has received positive feedback from the public, and to date, it has had nearly 350 000 views.

Media Hack has partnered with the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism to source more data for the dashboard.

To generate the dashboard’s data, Media Hack and Bhekisisa manually input the data to their datasets from press statements they receive in PDF format.

“Ideally, we would like to see the data released in a machine-readable form that would make it easier to automate the building of the charts analysing the situation,” says Otter. “We’ve been approached by many people to use our data, so there is a lot of interest in building solutions on top of the coronavirus data.

“There are a number of other projects running coronavirus dashboards and none of them appear to have any more data than we do. I'd like to see a broad body of interested parties lobbying together to get government to improve the quality and consistency of the data being released.

“There are also a number of initiatives going on to get the IT sector to assist government with the pandemic. At this stage, we don't really know what the situation within government is that is preventing setting up a better data release programme.

“Consistent reporting across all branches of government is important to ensure the public can trust the data that is available. Ultimately, better data makes it easier to inform the public and build confidence in the government processes in place to deal with this pandemic.”

Anyone interested in helping the Media Hack Collective can go to its Web site, or e-mail data@mediahack.co.za.

The coronavirus dashboard can be found here.

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