Covid-19: Cases, Tests and Deaths…January to July 2020

Having done a fascinating Influenza project at the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic, I decided to tackle Covid-19 for the final project of my year long CareerFoundry course.

I had a wide range of data thanks to the meticulous data gathering by Worldometer which provided real-time updates daily on Covid-19 statistics. (1). Some of the variables Worldometer kept track of included total cases, deaths, recovered and tests for all of the countries in the world that provided data. This project only reflects data regarding Covid-19 from January until July of 2020.

I was already familiar with Worldometer, myself daily checking the Covid-19 statistics myself for the state I was living in (Connecticut). I also looked at the stats for the United States, and for the world as trend comparison.

I wanted to stay constantly updated on the different trends so that I could try to keep my family safe and isolated when things got really bad.

For this project, the statistics that really piqued my interest and awakened my curiosity involved the number of confirmed cases, the number of tests, and the number of deaths.

Since this data was divided by country, I thought that looking at the regional averages would be beneficial.

Fig. 1: Screenshot of the Worldometer page which kept accurate daily statistics on different aspects of Covid-19 including cases, deaths, and tests by country.

My first hypothesis was that a higher test rate results in a higher case count and a lower death rate among those confirmed cases.

My theory was that more testing would lead to more awareness of the Covid-19 virus which would lead to earlier care for the patient along with the isolation of the patient to prevent further spread of infection into the public. Without testing, people would just keep getting sicker, infecting others and raising the probability of more deaths.

I decided to create a variable for comparing test rates between the countries. I divided all countries into which have lower, medium and higher test rates.

The table below implies that generally lower test rates correlate with lower case/death rates while higher test rates correlate with higher case/death rates.

On the surface, this appears to affirm my hypothesis when it comes to tests and cases, but it is the opposite of what I expected in terms of death rates.

Lower test rate countries only averaged a testing rate of 1% (only about 10,000 tests per million people). It also shows that just over 10% of tests resulted in a positive case (1115 total cases from around 10,000 tests) and that 3.2% of confirmed cases result in death.

Medium test rate countries averaged a testing rate of 5.5%, a positive case rate of 7%, and had 3.17% of confirmed cases result in death.

Higher test rate countries averaged a testing rate of 27.4%, a positive case rate of 2.6% and had 2.45% of confirmed cases result in death.

Fig 2: A look at the average deaths, cases, and tests per million people for countries with higher, lower and medium test rates.

So what does all of this mean? My theory is that lower test rate countries had lots of unconfirmed cases and lots of deaths that were not specifically attributed to Covid-19. It was very difficult to determine how many people had Covid-19 when only 1% of the country was tested. Lower test rate countries also had the highest rate of confirmed cases resulting in death. When the testing rate increases to 27.4% (the higher test rate countries average), the positive case rate and death rate both shrank substantially as well.

My second hypothesis was that there was a regional correlation in the percentage of cases, tests and deaths that a country had. My theory was that a country like the United States would have similar percentages to Canada. I thought that comparing each region of the world to each other would be beneficial in seeing overall trends.

Fig. 3: A look at the average numbers of cases, deaths, and tests per one million people for each of the major regions of the world.

Comparing the different regions by cases, deaths and tests per one million population found some interesting facts:

-The Middle East had an extremely high cases/1M population along with strong testing numbers and a relatively low death rate.

-The Americas had a high case rate, high death rate, and a medium test rate.

-Europe had the highest death and test rate, and a medium case rate.

-Africa, Southeast Asia and Western Pacific all had comparatively lower rates for all three variables.

Looking at the average number of deaths as it related to the average number of confirmed cases for countries in each region also revealed some fascinating facts.

Africa had the highest average percentage of confirmed cases resulting in death with 16.9%. One can see that the overall average deaths/confirmed cases number for Africa was actually quite low.

When looking at the below spatial map, many patches in Africa are missing data (along with Southeast Asia as well).

I believe that Europe had a very high deaths from confirmed cases rate (8.6%) because of the high population density and the high rate of elderly population which resulted in many more confirmed cases resulting in death.

Fig. 4: A look at the regions comparing the average number of confirmed cases and how many of these cases result in death.

Fig. 5: A spatial map showing the number of cases per one million population by the tone of the country's color, and number of deaths per one million population by the size of the red circle.

The two regions that stand out the most are:

-The Americas (both North and South) and how high the case count/1M was for places like the United States, Brazil and Chile.

-Europe and how there was an astronomical % of deaths/1M for places like Italy, Spain and England.

In conclusion, it is disturbing to look at the statistics for the months of January to July of 2020 since the world was dealing with something so unprecedented.

As one can see with the arrow on the daily deaths chart to the right that the pandemic still had quite a ways to go.

Mask wearing was not as common as it soon would become, and the vaccine was still a long ways off.

Testing had just started exploding but only in certain parts of the world.

It would be interesting to see what happened to the statistics for the rest of the pandemic, wouldn’t it?

Fig. 6: Two charts from Worldometer that show from the beginning of the pandemic to now in terms of the daily cases and the daily deaths.

To be continued…

References:

1. Kaggle.com with Worldometer’s Covid-19 Data for Jan. to July 2020 https://www.kaggle.com/imdevskp/corona-virus-report

2. Worldometer Covid-19 Counter https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/