COVID-19 Analysis

With the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 virus on its current global pandemic of causing COVID-19 there is a lot of interesting data to be analysed. Getting a hold of the data isn't very easy, but I managed to get it from the worldometers website and using Wayback Machine I was able to get data for a few countries of interest. I have made some interesting plots below and it provides some details on the expected trajectory of the pandemic. 

This is a basic plot of selected countries and the total number of infections tracing back from today. Of interest here is that China and South Korea have very similar curves whereas the rest of the countries have clear exponential curves. I didn't fit the data in this post perhaps I will later when there is more data available for these countries of interest. Notice the "S" shaped curve for both the China and South Korea curves. This is a logistic curve, and we can see that the total number of infections has reached a plateau. China can do this because with its authoritarian government it can hold people against their will and force them into isolation.  South Korea seems to have made progress via mass scale testing alone unlike any other developed country. The other countries are either unable to have Chinese style control or are several weeks to months away from mass scale testing like South Korea.

Now take the derivative of the first set of data. This would represent the number of new infections per day. Notice how China and South Korea are both downtrending which is due to their control of the virus. Norway appears to be downtrending however there is due to just a couple of data points and it can go up. 

What if we take another derivative. Now this is the rate of change of the number of new infections. A negative value here implies the Ro value is below 1 and the virus spread is starting to become contained. This is also known as the inflection point which was covered in introductory calculus courses. Once the second derivative is below zero the virus will start to become contained. China and South Korea both have second derivatives below zero. It does not look promising for everyone else.

The last set of data I'll explore here is the number of infections per million. Here it looks like the United States is the best off country and they appear to be doing very well. The United States, Australia and Canada are all several weeks behind the other infected countries. I would expect Canada and Australia to have very similar numbers over the next few weeks owing to similar healthcare systems. Of all the countries mentioned here so far the USA is the biggest wild card. There has been more testing at the hospital where I work over the last month than there has been in the entire United States and the numbers for the United States are highly underreported.  Also the United States is the only country which is does not have universal healthcare and this could result in many people not be treated, which is something I have not heard about in any media post thus far.

Here there is a zoom out of the previous plot. Italy, Iran and Norway are some of the hardest hit countries. South Korea still has more cases per million, however the trajectory of Iran and Norway will surpass South Korea very soon.


I'll revisit this data over the next month or so and hopefully the world won't split into chaos and anarchy.

Now go wash your hands...