Following an article published in the Daily Maverick, co-ordinator at PANDA (pandemic – data and analytics) has written a response to the piece that he describes as a ‘ tabloid-grade hit piece’. ‘The authors take aim at PANDA’s models. They criticise PANDA’s mortality model for supposedly predicting 10,000 confirmed Covid deaths in the first wave (PANDA’s model was in fact the most accurate model produced for South Africa and we estimated 20,000 deaths in the very first paper we produced). Yet, they make not a peep about government’s model of 351,000 confirmed Covid deaths (not “excess deaths”) in the first wave. Read Hudson’s right of response below.