Fig. 2.

shows how the South African epidemic progressed over the period discussed by this paper –the first three months – along with key decisions and events. Three issues in particular are worth noting: that the number of deaths remained low throughout; the lockdown did not contain spread; and, that the government began to ease lockdown regulations even as the number of infections escalated. (We have opted to use a linear rather than logarithmic scale since the latter is arguably not especially beneficial in the early stages of an epidemic and has other limitations (Romano et al. 2020).) Separate data on excess mortality from natural causes up until the end of May 2020 did not show a deviation from projections based on previous years (Bradshaw et al., 2020a).(Subsequent data shows excess mortality from natural causes from approximately mid-June to mid-August (Bradshaw et al., 2020c) – this is outside the period considered by the present paper but does not contradict the arguments presented.)