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12 May 2020 | Story Andre Damons | Photo Pexels

A data scientist and research coordinator at the University of the Free State (UFS), in collaboration with his supervisor at the University of Pretoria (UP), is at the forefront of the fight against the Covid-19 virus with accurate data and analysis.
Herkulaas Combrink of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the UFS and PhD candidate in Computer Science at the UP, said accurate data is important to prevent widespread panic and sensationalism during a global disaster such as the current pandemic. This information helps people to make informed decisions and to reduce their exposure to the threat of the virus.

Assisting decision-makers

“I, along with colleagues from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the USA, the provincial office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, provincial clinicians, and the Free State Department of Health led by Dr David Motau, have been able to progress significantly in terms of evidence-based tools to assist provincial and national decision-makers during these turbulent times.”
“It does come at a cost, though, in that we have worked continuously since the lockdown, dedicating all our time and efforts to the department from all over to ensure that we are not part of some of the global statistics we have seen,” said Combrink. 

A paper written together with his supervisor, Dr Vukosi Marivate, has also been accepted by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET)-accredited Data Science Journal.  This paper is related to a framework for sharing public data to the public in a way that is useful, usable, and understandable. 

Ongoing projects

Combrink said it is hard to name all those who are/were involved in the great work done by the Free State Department of Health, but some of them include Dr Elizabeth Reji (Head of Department, Family Medicine), Dr Collin Noel (surgeon, senior lecturer at the UFS), Dr Sammy Mokoena (community health registrar, UFS), Dr Ming-Han Motloung (public health medicine specialist, senior lecturer, UFS), Dr Perpetual Chikobvu (Director: Information Management at the Department of Health, affiliated lecturer at the UFS), as well as Alfred Deacon (lecturer at the UFS), who have worked at some point during this short space of time on one of the many projects. 

Some of the projects include the following:

• A provincial database for screening and monitoring.
• A data pipeline and assembly of hospital information flow, liaised with the NICD, Vodacom, and the different district managers to ensure that the pipeline occurs in a timely manner.
• Digitised paper-based capturing tools for rapid data capturing and processing.
• Incorporated state-of-the-art visualisation tools to action data into useful information for decision-makers in certain areas.
• Provided both provincial and national projections, stress testing different scenarios using a variety of statistical, computational, and/or machine-learning approaches to add to the already existing projections of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
• Training healthcare professionals in the field to apply these tools within their own districts.
No easy task

“These aforementioned feats were by no means easy and are not completed yet, but we are getting there. In the foreseeable future, I will be working closely with national and international researchers to deploy a tool for hospital managers in the Free State that will assist them when we move from level 5 to any level below.”

“In addition to this, I am constantly providing support to the Free State Department of Health regarding any analysis required for decision-making purposes. The teams we work in comprise highly competent individuals with a passion for solving problems from multidisciplinary perspectives,” according to Combrink.

News Archive

US author launches book at UFS on African volk
2016-10-17

Description: Dr Jamie Miller Tags: Dr Jamie Miller

Dr Jamie Miller, Postdoctoral Fellow at the
University of Pittsburgh and author of
An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime
and Its Search for Survival.
Photo: Rulanzen Martin

“I realised the importance of not just accessing the policies and political approaches of the leaders of the apartheid regime, but understanding the ideas and world views that informed them. Part of the solution to this was to learn Afrikaans.”

This is according to Dr Jamie Miller, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, on how he went about getting inside the mind of South Africa’s apartheid regime in order to complete his book, An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and Its Search for Survival.

The book was launched on 11 October 2016 by the Archive for Contemporary Affairs at the University of the Free State on the Bloemfontein Campus.

Volk refers to the Afrikaner nationalist movement
The book is an ambitious new international history of 1970s apartheid South Africa. It is based on newly declassified documents and oral histories, the majority in Afrikaans, which focus on the regime’s attempts to turn the new political climate to its advantage.

The term volk refers to the Afrikaner nationalist movement, also known as Afrikanerdom. The story of Afrikaner nationalism was the medium through which the regime gained power.

Four main messages from the book

Dr Miller says there are four main messages for his readers. Firstly, the apartheid regime looked to contest and hijack new ideas and norms that formed the postcolonial world, and secondly, that we need to start thinking more seriously about the Cold War in terms of domestic politics, not just geopolitics.

Thirdly, South Africa should be integrated into histories of the global South, and lastly, we should conceptualise the apartheid regime by looking at it not just as an imperial holdover, but also by looking at what was happening in the world in the time period in question.

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