"South Africa detected its first novel coronavirus infection on 5 March. For the next few weeks, the epidemic followed an exponential curve similar to those in the United Kingdom, the United States, and many other countries. On 15 March, the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, declared a national state of emergency banning visitors from high-risk countries, stopping large gatherings, closing more than half of its land borders, and shutting schools. On 27 March the country started a 21-day lockdown, closing all borders and confining everyone except those performing essential services to their homes except to buy groceries and medicine or to collect welfare payments." Science Magazine.
PingER
We used the PingER IPDV daily data for the last 365 days. It includes measurements from the SLAC host pinger.slac.stanford.edu in Northern California (Lat, Long =37.4177, -122.2035) to 7 hosts in South Africa.
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Traceroute from SLAC to www.museumsnc.co.za from SLAC |
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Wed May 6 12:29:15 2020: executing exec(traceroute -m 30 -q 1 -w 1 -A 154.0.166.162 140)=traceroute 16 gm-colo3-core2-lq.aserv.co.za (169.1.21.187) [AS37611] 317.722 ms |
Countries bordering South Africa
A possibility explored was just selecting hosts in the 6 countries bordering and including South Africa (TLDs BW, LS, SZ, ZA, ZW) and then just using hosts with TLDs .co, .com, .go, .gov or including banc or bank in the name. The ideas was that such hosts are probably on commodity networks. However as of May 5th, 2020 these countries have few Covid-19 cases (BW:23, LS: 0, NA 101, SZ (Eswatine): 145, ZA: 218,329, ZW:34). As expected we could not identify a significant impact of Covid-19 on IPDV.
Useful other documents
Coronavirus-free Lesotho relaxes lockdown restrictions, 5/6/2020
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