The Shape of COVID

Classifying and Cataloging SARS-CoV-2 National Outbreaks

Ten months on, how well have countries responded to COVID-19? Did spring lockdowns work to contain the virus and protect lives? Have summer rebounds sent us back to where we started? What can we learn from the different approaches taken?

It is not uncommon in research, to start down one road, with the kernel of an idea, only to take a detour that leads to a much more interesting destination, usually after a few wrong-turns and dead-ends. This was the case for this work, and what began as narrow investigation of virus transmission rates, led to a new way to visualise, analyse and compare how countries have responded to the pandemic. I’d like to describe the results of this journey in this article, and the key points can be summaries as follows:

1. I describe a new metric to measure transmission rates, which is related to the well-known R number, but is more straightforward to calculate.
2. I present a novel way to visualise the response of countries to the pandemic, and the effect of their response on key outcomes such as prevalence, transmission, and fatalities.
3. I argue that these visualisations reveal two distinctive response patterns, which are associated with very different outcomes across a sample of 36 countries.