How a desire to help led me to track COVID numbers and make sense of them through graphs
AS COVID took hold in South Africa, daily case numbers grew. But the numbers people were seeing online or on news channels did not tell the full story of the pandemic. Ridhwaan Suliman works as a computational modelling researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. He started tracking the numbers in his personal capacity. Using publicly available data from daily case numbers, testing rates, hospitalisations and deaths, he mapped the trends that emerged over time. After initially sharing some graphs with a few friends and family, he decided to post these on Twitter. He started with about 90…