I’ve been interested in better understanding why Covid infection and mortality rates vary wildly from country to country.

What seems to matter the most: Country size? Earlier response? Contact tracing? Testing rates? Better government healthcare policy? Trying to find a logical correlation is not that easy, because the data is not only readily available, and opinions abound. In this post, I wanted to focus on the mortality rate and scope of the spread, as a percentage of the population.

I chose a representative sample from countries in 3 population sizes:

Large: USA, Brazil, Japan, Germany, France, Indonesia, UK.

Medium: South Korea, Poland, Canada, Taiwan.

Small: Sweden, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand.

First, let’s establish the baseline. On a worldwide basis, .64% of the population have been infected (40.1 million cases, as of Oct 18 2020). Of these 40.1 million people, 1.11 million have died, which is 2.77% of cases.

Here are some observations and anomalies worth noting from the data in this table:

Cases as a % of Population

On a relative spread basis, South Korea (.05%), Japan (.07%), Indonesia (.14%) and Taiwan (.2%) have had notably small numbers of infection cases as a % of the population. These are really low numbers, on a relative basis.

Deaths as a % of Cases

The only country with a staggering low death rate is Singapore at .048% where only 28 deaths were reported out of 57,911 cases. On the upper scale, the UK has reached a mortality rate close to 6%, which is more than double the world’s average or even Germany’s rate. Canada (4.92%) and Sweden (5.74%) are also punching way above the world’s average, although both countries took different approaches to dealing with the virus.

In the United States, where a lot of controversy exists due to a high total number of Coronavirus cases (8.19 million being 20.4% of the world’s total), it is interesting to note that, although the spread of the virus (2.48% of the population) is almost 4x the world’s average or 5x that of neighbouring Canada, the mortality rate is just 2.7% (on par with the world average), and almost half of Canada’s mortality rate (4.92%).

In Europe, Germany does better than France and the UK at .44% of population cases, versus 1.29% and 1% respectively, and has a more favourable mortality rate as well: 2.68% vs. 4% (France) and 5.9% (UK).

Another interesting comparison is Brazil vs. the USA where the % of population cases (2.49% / 2.48%) and mortality rates (2.95% / 2.70%) are very close to each other. However, the USA spends about 10x more than Brazil on their healthcare system, on a per capita basis.

A final comparative item is the impact of the virus on the economy. The UK economy seems to be the hardest hit (-21.7% contraction). Aside from that, there is no apparent correlation between the virus % of pop. cases or mortality rates and the impact on the economy, except the notable exceptions of Taiwan and South Korea where the negative economic impact has been quite muted (-.6% and -3% respectively).

Note: All data is Google data, as of Oct 19 2020.

I’ve been interested in better understanding why Covid infection and mortality rates vary wildly from country to country.

What seems to matter the most: Country size? Earlier response? Contact tracing? Testing rates? Better government healthcare policy? Trying to find a logical correlation is not that easy, because the data is not only readily available, and opinions abound. In this post, I wanted to focus on the mortality rate and scope of the spread, as a percentage of the population.

I chose a representative sample from countries in 3 population sizes:

Large: USA, Brazil, Japan, Germany, France, Indonesia, UK.

Medium: South Korea, Poland, Canada, Taiwan.

Small: Sweden, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand.

First, let’s establish the baseline. On a worldwide basis, .64% of the population have been infected (40.1 million cases, as of Oct 18 2020). Of these 40.1 million people, 1.11 million have died, which is 2.77% of cases.

Here are some observations and anomalies worth noting from the data in this table:

Cases as a % of Population

On a relative spread basis, South Korea (.05%), Japan (.07%), Indonesia (.14%) and Taiwan (.2%) have had notably small numbers of infection cases as a % of the population. These are really low numbers, on a relative basis.

Deaths as a % of Cases

The only country with a staggering low death rate is Singapore at .048% where only 28 deaths were reported out of 57,911 cases. On the upper scale, the UK has reached a mortality rate close to 6%, which is more than double the world’s average or even Germany’s rate. Canada (4.92%) and Sweden (5.74%) are also punching way above the world’s average, although both countries took different approaches to dealing with the virus.

In the United States, where a lot of controversy exists due to a high total number of Coronavirus cases (8.19 million being 20.4% of the world’s total), it is interesting to note that, although the spread of the virus (2.48% of the population) is almost 4x the world’s average or 5x that of neighbouring Canada, the mortality rate is just 2.7% (on par with the world average), and almost half of Canada’s mortality rate (4.92%).

In Europe, Germany does better than France and the UK at .44% of population cases, versus 1.29% and 1% respectively, and has a more favourable mortality rate as well: 2.68% vs. 4% (France) and 5.9% (UK).

Another interesting comparison is Brazil vs. the USA where the % of population cases (2.49% / 2.48%) and mortality rates (2.95% / 2.70%) are very close to each other. However, the USA spends about 10x more than Brazil on their healthcare system, on a per capita basis.

A final comparative item is the impact of the virus on the economy. The UK economy seems to be the hardest hit (-21.7% contraction). Aside from that, there is no apparent correlation between the virus % of pop. cases or mortality rates and the impact on the economy, except the notable exceptions of Taiwan and South Korea where the negative economic impact has been quite muted (-.6% and -3% respectively).

Note: All data is Google data, as of Oct 19 2020.