Coronavirus data analysis

I love data analysis! I downloaded coronavirus daily data by country from www.ecdc.europa.eu and made this Excel file to analyze it and make the charts posted below. I can make additional analysis, waiting for your ideas!

Note: if you find anything wrong or have suggestions what else to add/change, please leave a comment or message me via chat or email!

History

Coronavirus allegedly started from a wet market of Wuhan, China in December 2019, if in January 2020 virus spreading was mostly limited to Wuhan province, other countries having just few isolated cases, in February more and more cases were confirmed outside China, and since March the virus spreading went out of control all over the world, increasing 100 times in just 30 days.

Number of confirmed infections in China reached 80,000 on 1 March but by end of march less than 2,000 new infections were confirmed. Meantime outside China, number of confirmed infections rose from 1,000 people as 18 February to 10,000 people as 2 March, to 100,000 people as 16 March, to 1,000,000 people as 3 April. 2 April was the day in which worldwide total infections exceeded 1,000,000 and deaths exceeded 50,000 people (source: worldometers.info), meanwhile daily infections exceeded 100,000 and daily deaths exceeded 5,000.

Since March 2020 most countries closed schools, cancelled sports events and holidays, restricted free movement. While China managed to slow down the spread of virus in February, Western Europe reached peak of daily infections in March-April and by May daily cases dropped enough for lockdowns to be removed, but not Russia where daily cases remained steadily. United States had the fastest virus spreading, because of too late prevention measures and not strict enough, Donald Trump was more worried about falling economy than about rising number of infections which may turn in deaths and even more economy falling, and americans keep gathering in large groups. I do not understand how was possible that 3 states (California, Florida, Texas) had a surge of cases since July while New York which was world epicenter in April maintained new cases under 1000/day since June onwards?

We all believed that India will take the lead, thanks to its huge population, but they managed to reduce virus spreading and reached a peak of 97,859 cases on 16 September 2020. United States was 1st country to report more than 100,000 cases/day on 30th October 2020.

Since September 2020 coronavirus cases skyrocketed again all over Europe and United States. This time countries did not set lockdowns until daily cases reached much higher numbers than April peaks, which in my opinion is too late to stop virus spreading. Worldwide daily cases rose from 300,000 in September to 600,000 today. Would not surprise me to see over 1 million cases per day by end of year.

Also a nice video from WawamuStats

Comparison

Coronavirus pandemic can be compared with 1918-1920 Spanish flu that is estimated to have infected 500 million people (a quarter of world population) and death toll is estimated to have been anywhere from 17 million to 50 million. Now after 1 century, the medicine evolved and SARS-COV-2 pandemic death toll may not become that big, but quarantine measures introduced to reduce virus spreading may affect economy harder than 2008-2009 Great Recession, possible even harder than 1929 Wall Street Crash.

If the number of cases are rising compared with number of doctors, plus increase of infected doctors, the death rate will increase rapidly in the future (see chart), supply of goods will be disturbed, turning people to looting and social unrest.

Note: Confirmed cases aren’t all cases. They only include people who tested positive. Testing rules and availability vary by country. People may be sick with the virus for 1 to 14 days before developing symptoms. Some people never develop symptoms. On Diamond Princess cruise ship, half of passengers tested and confirmed to be infected with coronavirus were asymptomatic (source: CNN). All around the world there are people caring virus but having no symptoms to motivate going to doctor and confirm or infirm the virus, they continue to travel around, going to their jobs using buses and risk infecting everyone in their way. COVID-19 can spread easily if you breathe same air with an infected person, or if you touch an object (such as bus handbars) that was previously touched by an infected person, then touch your mouth or nose. For safety reasons, anyone should keep distance from any other people even if in your city there are none or few confirmed cases (confirmed cases are usually hospitalized and quarantined).