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Hack the Virus 2020

This notebook has been inspired by the hackathon event “Hack the Virus 2020”. It has been written on the weekend of 2020–04–04/2020–04–05.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus transformed the Earth into a giant institution where every country corresponds to a laboratory which is trying to stop the propagation of the virus.

We can’t influence the “experiments” effectuated in these “laboratories”, but we can observe the actions performed, the resulting effects, and we might be able to draw some conclusions.

We are going to show the daily infections vs the total infections or the daily death cases vs the total death cases with a rolling average of 7 days by default. The time component is not explicitly on the graph, but every dot represents a day.

These plots are not intended to represent the exact numbers, but it will be easier to see the trends.

We are going to show the graphs only for a few countries at a time and will try to draw some conclusions.

Let’s check first 4 North European countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. These countries are quite similar in people mentality. Population of each country is around ~5 million except Sweden with a population of about ~10 million.

Observations:

Now let’s take a look on France, Italy and Spain. These countries are the most heavily hit by Covid-19 in Europe.

Why is this virus so widespread in these countries? Well people here are social beings — more than in other parts of the world. And they talk a lot. And there are a lot of old people how liked to talk to each other. This kept them alive for longer then people in other parts of the world. Now suddenly the social distancing has been introduced and probably a lot of old people getting in the ICU just give up the fight because they don’t want to live in a world where face to face conversations are forbidden.

I think it is airborne. I reached this conclusion through a less scientific method: reading news.

…

Now this is super interesting. Almost 60 years after the Spanish flu killed ~50 million people, we discovered that influenza is airborne. Hopefully we are going to progress faster with Covid-19 scientific research (and we won’t run into Y2K problem after 100 years :)).

Since we are talking about South Korea, let’s have a look on Covid stats of the Asian Tigers.

It looks like that bump has been contained and now they have about 100 new cases per day. This graph it seems to me somewhat regular. There are elections coming on 15th of April and we’ll see later how the graph is progressing.

Japan seemed to contain the spread of the virus till 24th of March when they announced that the Olympics will be postponed by 1 year. Since then the number of cases started to grow quicker. Not sure what is the relation.

Singapore seems to be the best performing country of containing the virus among these contenders. However we have countries which are performing even better:

Hong Kong was considered a role model in containing the virus, but the number of infections increased lately mainly by imported cases.

Vietnam is performing even better than Taiwan, even though we haven’t heard about Vietnam in the news. This is the case when no news is good news.

All these countries have previous experience containing the SARS virus and it seems they could apply the lessons learned for SARS-CoV-2 virus as well.

It looks like China contained the virus with infection rate of 0.01 % and mortality rate of about ~4 %. The graph shows several edges — it looks like they changed their mind in reporting the cases at least 2..3 times while handling the disease. We don’t necessarily believe their numbers, but we think they are in control of the outbreak since they started easing the lockdowns.

US is still in epidemic phase. US deaths already surpassed multiple times the Chinese data and this is going to grow for a few weeks since peeking of death cases will lag about 1 week after the infections peek.

Iran was one of the first epidemic centers outside of China. Looking at graph there is still no sign of slowing down the spreading of the disease.

Turkey was hoping a few weeks ago that it will get away without significant outbreak. Now they are at ~24,000 cases and counting.

Turkey’s death rate shape closely follows the Iranian trends with about 3 weeks delay.

The Iranian data seems to be manipulated, it looks like max death cases are capped at around ~150.

In Czechia the masks are compulsory since mid of March and the daily infection rate seems to stabilize.

Switzerland has no rules regarding wearing of masks and they have the highest infection and mortality rate. However I don’t think that during lockdown masks make a huge difference, because anyway there is a limited contact between people. The masks might make a bigger difference when the lockdowns are lifted.

Relatively low numbers, the trends look OK, we’ll see what brings the future.

Luxembourg has one of the highest infection rates worldwide — currently is at 0.45 %. This is mainly because of extensive testing — which reflects on the low mortality rate — currently at about ~1 %.

Belgium and Netherlands mortality rate close to ~10 % probably because the lack of testing.

German infection rate is double of the UK infection rate, but the number of coronavirus deaths in UK is three times the number of deaths in Germany. I guess testing is not top priority in UK.
In the beginning the official stand in UK was to let the virus spread and achieve herd immunity, but after a quick calculation on the back of the envelope they changed their minds.

We have seen that different countries take different approach to fight the virus. We have seen that some of the statistics appear manipulated. Even when the stats are not manipulated we have only an estimation of the true infection rate because of different approach of testing. Some countries try to perform extensive testing and these countries usually have a lower mortality rate (about ~1..2 %). Other countries test only those with symptoms and there are even countries where testing is performed only when somebody has symptoms and it is known to have been exposed to infection. These countries have a higher mortality rate — about 5..10 %. And we have countries like Italy or Spain, where they perform intensive testing, but the healthcare can’t cope with the high amount of severe cases and the mortality rate is ~10 % or higher.

According to the statistics Italy and Spain has an infection rate of about 0.3 %. Even if we consider that the real infection rate is 1 % and we consider that this has been achieved in just one month, to get to 60 % infection rate would mean 5 years till herd immunity.
Without lockdown and social distancing the SARS-CoV-2 virus could spread worldwide in just 1 year, but our society is not prepared to handle the resulting high death rate.

The Covid-19 outbreak has been best handled by Taiwan and Vietnam, but even they can’t relax because there is a constant danger of importing undetected cases.

to-be-continued here

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