Covid-19 How are Geographic Neighbours handling their Response?

As the ongoing global pandemic from the Coronavirus, (CoVID-19), continues there have been reactive actions taken by the governments, from closing borders to


While here in Canada the restrictions vary by degree from province to province, the goal behind all of them was unanimous, to reduce the spread of infection by enforcing mandated social distancing through the elimination of attending enclosed settings with numerous bodies, an example of this being Nova Scotia closing of bars and restaurants on March 19th, 2020. Overall the global scene Canada’s response to the pandemic was received positively when compared to their neighbour to their south.


In comparison to their neighbors to the North, the United States of America had a slower response time to enforce lockdowns on businesses, for example one of their more populous states, New York, started their stay at home orders March 22, 2020. However, the United States also has faced a series of protests throughout the country, people who view the lockdowns as a violation of their civil liberties. The United States also has been assessing and implementing lockdown easing at an earlier timeline than most of Canada. Overall, the global reception to the United States’ Covid-19 response has been a negative, especially regarding their actions at a federal level.


Has Canada’s response truly been that much greater than the United States? Is easing lockdowns in either country something that should occur now or is too early to be making such decisions where the consequences could possibly leave a lasting impact.


Data

    

For the data points in this the calendar month of April is being used, as it is the first full month of both countries enforcing stay at home orders and shut down businesses as a response to the current situation. The numbers in this charts were acquired from the dataset being updated daily by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

Figure 1: New Reported Cases/Day in Canada during April 2020.

Figure 2: New Reported Cases/Day in USA during April 2020

From the line charts above in figures 1 and 2 representing the amount of new cases being reported each day throughout the month of April we can take some hypothesises about how things may progress over time, current behaviours, as well as local and global maxima and minima over the timeline.  The chart representing Canada’s amount of new cases has more of a spread of maximum and minimum of the same timeframe as the USA, both charts feature a global maxima, that is a peak where the new cases is at its highest value, that could be argued to be an outlier for the rest of the month of April. Both countries show higher amount of new cases on the last day of April compared to the first day of the month, however in respect to their own values’ Canada’s finishes with a higher amount of new cases comparatively. 

Figure 3: Deaths/Day in Canada throughout April

Figure 4: Deaths/Day in USA throughout April

    

Figures three and four represent the number of new deaths reported in Canada and the United States of America respectively because of the Coronavirus. Both nations follow a similar increasing trendline throughout the month, with an exception of a large peak in the United States near the middle of the month. While Canada finishes the month on a trending downward line in regards to the last days of the month, both nations show a downwards trending line which would hypothesize that as the days roll through may that the amount of deaths could potentially continue to decrease.

Figure 5: Deaths/Day in Canada

Figure 6: Deaths/Day in USA

The box chart’s shown above in figures 5 and 6 display the ranges for death’s pet day in Canada and the USA respectively, with the boxed area representing the more common amount of death’s per day and the narrow line extending outwards representing the less frequent values. The separate dots on the USA chart representing outlier values, also able to be seen in the scatter charts. From the data set the average amount of deaths per day in Canada and the United States were 97 and 1926 respectively, based on the 2018 population values for each country, 327,167,434 for the US and 37,058,856 for Canada. This represents a ratio of approximately 8.8 between the total populations of the two nations, when Canada’s current mean deaths per day is multiplied by that ratio is 855 deaths per day, still less than half the current mean value in the United States.

Conclusions?

   

What can be taken from this data? From the data above we can hypothesis that if things were to remain in the same social situation as it were in April, remain at home, business shut down then things would continue to trend downwards, both in amount of new cases and deaths related to the virus.


Looking at the mean values of deaths per day between the two countries being a factor of 2.25 when factoring in population differences, one could conclude that the reception to the USA’s response to the pandemic was worse than Canada’s. However, before reaching that conclusion one could also argue that there are possible factors that aren’t included in the dataset used for this analysis, such as population density, and areas of high infection rates. The United States has far more highly and densely populated cities than Canada which would increase risk of infection; unfortunately, this type of information isn’t available from this dataset.

Appendixes 

Download today’s data on the geographic distribution of COVID-19 cases worldwide https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/download-todays-data-geographic-distribution-covid-19-cases-worldwide