Data Visualization of COVID-19 : Italy-Turkey-Iran Comparison
When the COVID-19 outbreak first began, almost all countries except China did not take this seriously.
Even when the virus entered through the door, the measures taken were insufficient and this led to much greater disasters.
The virus spread very fast in some countries, and the mortality rate exceeded normal. Scientists have been thinking and talking about this for a long time.
In this article, we have three countries; Italy, Turkey, and Iran we look at the COVID-19 data. Trying to understand the differences and make inferences over the graphics.
First Look: General Information Before Pandemic
These three countries are very similar to each other in terms of population, geography, and daily relations. The population of these countries according to 2018 figures;
Turkey: 80.81 million,
Iran: 81.8 million,
Italy: 60.48 million.
All three countries are located in the temperate zone and their geographical features are very close to each other.
Although it is not known exactly how Covid-19 spreads according to the climate characteristics, it can be said that it is dependent on climate by looking at other virus types.
It is also known that the people of these three countries are warm-blooded and love to touch each other.
According to researches, the pandemic is transmitted much faster through body contact.
The group most affected by pandemic is people over 65+. When we look at the elderly population rates in three countries;
Italy : %23,
Turkey: %9.1,
Iran: %5.
According to these rates, we can say that Italy is riskier than others. The elderly in these three countries generally live with their families. The rate of elderly living alone is low compared to other countries.
Pandemic Begins: Country Measures
Some countries are late in taking action when the virus enters the door. Even if measures were taken, these measures were mostly on paper and the public did not comply with these decisions.
Therefore, the virus continued to spread rapidly. In the image below, the measures taken by countries as of April 20 can be seen.
Turkey seems to have taken more measures than the other two countries. It can be said that Italy and Iran are worse in this regard. So is this reflected in the data like this? Let’s see.
What does the data say?
As is the case with epidemics, COVID-19’s growth was exponential at first. Imagine a person with COVID-19 going to a party and spreading the disease to three people. The next day those three people spread the virus to three other people each. Within two days, one case of Coronavirus has turned into fourteen.
However, not all cases can be detected, since countries cannot test enough when the virus first appeared.
For this reason, the distribution of data in the first days does not fit the general averages.
For example, we have seen that the death rate of the virus in Iran is 100%, then 20–40%.
On the other hand, that was around 2.5% in China.
Therefore, in this study, the analysis was made over the dates after the death of the first case, where the data began to approach the reality more than the first case.
In the graphs, we see the values presented with density maps. For example, Italy has about 13% death rate, 3200 new cases per day are the most common.
In the distribution of the number of Iran daily cases, we see that around 1100 values are rapidly increasing. However, the transition of values has been very harsh. We realize that this is not seen in the other two countries.
Good news, the number of patients treated for all three countries has increased faster than the number of cases. For Iran, the break in the chart is obvious. We can see that the number of discharges increases rapidly.
By looking at the graphs, we can say that all three countries have exceeded the inflection point. We observe that the data inconsistency at the beginning of the pandemic has decreased gradually and the data has been stabilized recently.
Despite “turning the corner” and passing the inflection point in every state, this is no time to encourage the return to normalcy. Returning to normalcy will only lead us back to exponential growth.
I am thinking of continuing this kind of country comparison until it’s time to return to normal.
Code
Codes used for all the analyses in this article can be accessed here
Sources
Originally published at http://data335938918.wordpress.com on May 5, 2020.
