SEE: Durban maths teacher uses his knowledge to become a pro at Twitter

We have heard many stories about people who have used the hard lockdown as a means to follow a passion, or even find their passion, but this story works backwards. 

It shows how someone can use their time and their skills to do well at something that hasn't really been their forte in the past. And the great part is that he is from Durban, so we have even more to cheer about. 

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Sugan Naidoo, a maths teacher, found that the statistics that the Department of Health provided when it came to the COVID-19 numbers were both confusing and didn't really paint a clear picture of what we were dealing with. 

So he decided to use his knowledge and this gap in communication to create charts and tables that would provide a clearer picture for South Africans when it came to the breakdown of the COVID-19 numbers. 

"When Durban-based maths teacher Sugan Naidoo started tweeting about the Covid-19 pandemic in April last year, he had just 35 followers. Eighteen months later, he has over 23,000 followers - among them some of the country's most respected doctors, journalists, and politicians," Business Insider reports.

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A huge leap for someone who isn't a social media person, but nevertheless did his thing and it clearly worked. Considering he has a following of over 20,000 people shows that he used his skills, partnered with a gap in the market, and made things work. 

Sometimes that's all you need. His success has been upvoted to the point that "he's been asked for advise about the peaks of the next waves and spoken to provincial Covid-19 response teams about how best to communicate messages around the pandemic to the general public. Naidoo's jump from unknown Twitter user to leading Covid-19 tweeter is due to a combination of lockdown boredom, frustration with official Covid-19 reporting, persistence, and his ability to deliver a clear and concise message due to his experience as a maths, and maths literacy teacher," Business Insider adds.

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He doesn't have the time nowadays to come up with new ways of bettering his content but he still posts and updates his audience when it comes to the numbers and creating efficient and easy-to-understand tables. 

With innovators such as Sugan, it goes to show that when you match your passion with a gap in the market, you can reach people with your messaging, even if that wasn't your initial intention. 

Image Courtesy of Twitter