COVID trend analysis
Lock-down measures were a theoretical strategy to contain and flatten the curve and to all extents, they “feel” like they’re working but can we prove it using data?
We have been analysing COVID country data since February and have now combined Google’s mobility data to give us a holistic view of emerging trends.
What do the charts show?
The green mobility (retail & recreation) data shows a comparison to “normal” before COVID, so is anchored to the zero line at the top e.g. the deeper the green line, the more people have stayed away from cafes, shopping centres, movie theatres etc for longer. In the example below, we see the UK’s retail & recreation movement was down at -75% of normal in April and is now still about half of normal right now.
The orange line shows daily cases and our ideal scenario is a bell-shaped curve, tapering off to very small volumes and finally zero (hurrah thought NZ only a week ago…).
Our findings so far
The visualisation shows four countries with vary degrees of “success” in dealing with the COVID outbreak.
Italy was one of the first big casualties but enforced a heavy lockdown, which has only been eased when confirmed cases had reached a much lower volume. The UK is following that trend, now slowly easing things back open but maintaining a 50% reduction in peoples movement.
In contrast, the US mobility trend is very shallow and has almost returned to normal, far too quickly. We can see a relapsed of confirmed cases occurring. This combined with the protests is no doubt going to cause a longevity to the US’ lockdown requirements that their population and economy, does not want.
We have looked into Sweden a few times and again, their laissez-faire attitude to lock-down is still causing issues with rising incremental numbers. We can even see the green mobility line rise above zero, which indicates people are going out to cafes & restaurants more than they were before!
Who needs to learn from this?
There are a number of countries who haven’t reached the peak yet, so the lesson should be to remain with the lock-down strategies for as long as feasibly possible, which is definitely a balancing act.
Our examples below show that this is happening in general, although Russia and India might be relaxing too early.
Data notes
We’ve used a rolling 14 day average (RA) to smooth the trends and remove the spikes.
The daily confirmed cases use an automatic axis, so each country has a different magnitude but we’re interested in the trend.
Google Mobility baseline: 5‑week period Jan 3 to Feb 6, 2020
Google Mobility Retail & Recreation: Restaurants, cafes, shopping centers, theme parks, museums, libraries, and movie theaters.
Our COVID dashboard is updated daily.
If you have any questions or ideas for further analysis, please feel free to get in touch.