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.