9/5/21: COVID19: BRIICS

 Updating data for BRIICS for Covid19 pandemic through Week 17 of 2021 (current week):

Almost half of all cumulated cases within the BRIICS (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa) group are now in India (above) and almost half of all deaths are in Brazil (below).

The pandemic dynamics have turned decisively in recent weeks: in terms of new cases, India dominates the trend up, with all other BRIICS showing amelioration in the pandemic:

Similarly, for we weekly death counts:

China data remains utterly unbelievable and hard to trust.

Summary table of recent developments:

India's pandemic dynamics are shocking, horrific and show no signs of abating. This is a humanitarian disaster that requires help from the rest of the world - help that has been coming in too-little and too-late.

8/5/21: COVID19: Most impacted countries

 Covering data through this week (week 17) of 2021 for world's most impacted countries.

First: most impacted countries by the rate of infections and by mortality:

There is only one large country (population > 100 million) that is listed in both tables: the U.S. 

Now, a table of countries with more than 1 million cases:

The U.S. ranks 8th worst performer in the group of 28 countries with more than 1 million cases, when measured across all three metrics: infections per 1 million of population, deaths per 1 million of population and deaths per 1,000 of diagnosed cases. 

Looking at major countries groups in the context of the above table:

Finally, looking at the most impacted countries from the point of their relative contributions to global totals for cases and deaths:

19/4/21: COVID19: BRIICS

BRIICS are now in a fully-developed Wave 4 of the pandemic, like much of the rest of the world. This is confirmed across both new case numbers and weekly deaths counts:

I highlighted in the table below two BRIICS countries with seriously questionable data quality: China and India. China has been routinely reporting numbers that simply are out of line with anything reported by other countries around the world. India's death statistics appear to be similarly out line with experience in most countries. In the past, Russia received a lot of criticism for its reporting of Covid19 deaths, but their numbers do not appear to be out of line with other countries reported statistics.

These are six largest emerging and middle income economies in the world, and their pandemic dynamics, in the end, hold the key to the global efforts on combating the spread of the disease. Not surprisingly, these countries account for three of the four main variants of the disease to-date. If anyone thinks that Europe and North America can effectively insulate themselves from what is happening in these countries, by any means other than attaining a sufficient and robust immunity through vaccinations, they really need to reflect hard on their rational thought capacity.

19/4/21: COVID19: Most impacted countries

 

Updated tables for world's most impacted countries and regions below. Starting with the countries with the highest recognized levels of infections:

Followed by the countries with the highest rates of mortality:

• Andorra, Montenegro and Czechia are top three countries in the world in terms of infections rates
• Gibraltar, Czechia and San Marino are top three countries in the world in terms of mortality rates
• Of larger countries, with population > 100 million, the U.S. is the only country featured on both lists, while Mexico is on the list of countries with highest mortality.

A set of table for countries with more than 250,000 recorded cases:

• There are 57 countries on the list as of Thursday last week. 
• Across three metrics used (infections rate, deaths per capita and mortality rate per case), Hungary is rated the worst, followed by Belgium and Bulgaria. Czechia and Slovakia share the 4th and 5th places.
• The U.S. is ranked 3rd highest in the number of infections, in the 8th place in terms of highest deaths per 1 million of population and in the 32nd place in terms of deaths per 1,000 infections. Overall, the U.S. is ranked 8th worst country in terms of pandemic performance across the three metrics.

Table next shows comparatives by the same metrics across regions, treating regions as if they were countries (ranks):

Finally, looking at the major countries and groupings in terms of their cases and deaths counts within the context of their shares of global population:

Notably, majority of the most impacted countries are, currently, in the process of developing, or already experiencing, a new wave of the pandemic.

2/4/21: COVID19: BRIICS

 As warned last month, BRIICS are now in a new wave of the pandemic, just like the rest of the world:

The new wave is worse than the previous one in terms of new weekly case counts and deaths. Brazil and India are leading the new cases pandemic, while Brazil leads in terms of deaths. Russia is relatively stable on deaths counts at highly elevated levels, while India death counts (highly suspicious in terms of low numbers throughout the entire 2021 so far) are now rising once again.

Table above shows summary of dynamics in current weekly cases and deaths relative to the prior 4 weeks average. 

These numbers strongly indicate that risk of pandemic will continue to spill over across the world, with no country immune to the new wave developing, until reaching 'herd immunity' levels via immunizations, assuming no adverse mutations in the virus.

1/34/21: COVID19: Most impacted countries

 Here is a set of summary tables for world's most impacted countries:

First, 17 countries with more than 7% of population tested positive:

And 16 countries with more than 0.15% of population dead:

Most are smaller in population countries. Outliers to this rule are:

• The U.S. that enters both of the lists as the only country with population > 15 million
• Mexico that enters the list for highest mortality countries (alongside the U.S.) - the only two countries on the list with population > 100 million
• Spain, UK and Italy are the three countries on the deadliest countries list with population between 45 million and 99 million.

The new wave starting means I should update the table for most impacted countries based on case counts alone. Prior to this week, I tracked countries with > 250,000 cases. There are now too many of these to make this table meaningful, so in days ahead, I will update the methodology to report countries with > 500,000 cases. Stay tuned. 

Instead, here is the list of countries and regions with > 3 percent of total global cases:

Most of these are now starting a new wave of the pandemic. 

13/3/21: COVID19 Update: BRIICS

Previous posts covered updates for Covid19 pandemic stats:

• Worldwide data: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/03/12321-covid19-update-worldwide-data.html, 
• Europe and the EU27 countries: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/03/13221-covid19-update-europe-and-eu27.html, and
• Most impacted countries: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/03/13321-covid19-update-most-impacted.html

In this update, let's take a look at the dynamics of the pandemic in BRIICS (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa) group of countries.

First, weekly case counts:

Brazil is leading BRIICS into what appears to be a new wave, Wave 4 of the pandemic. All other BRIICS countries are showing sustained moderation in new cases. There is also a much smaller uptick in new cases in India.

A similar picture emerges from weekly deaths data:

A summary table of per capita cases and deaths, as well as mortality rates.

One feature of the above dynamics is the state of uncertainty these highlight in the Emerging and Developing economies with respect to the recent improvements in the pandemic numbers. Sitting in the West, it is, perhaps (depending on the location) easy to slip into a state of overconfidence and complacency, as vaccines become more widely distributed and politicians trumpet the sight of 'normalcy' on the horizon. The problem with this worldview is three-fold:

1. This pandemic will not go away until we reach - globally - levels of vaccinations and infections that deliver global 'herd immunity', which would require 90%+ immunity cover; and
2. As long as there are large pools of the virus in the world at large, there will be higher likelihood (note: we do not know probability) of virus mutations that can render acquired immunity irrelevant, and
3. We are currently not doing anything near enough to deliver vaccines to the countries outside the Advanced economies world.  

13/3/21: COVID19 Update: Most impacted countries

 In previous posts, I covered updates for Covid19 pandemic figures for:

• Worldwide data: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/03/12321-covid19-update-worldwide-data.html, and
• Europe and the EU27 countries: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/03/13221-covid19-update-europe-and-eu27.html.

Now, world's worst hit countries and regions.

World's 5 worst impacted countries by the number of cases per capita (the first table above), with ranks 1 = worst:

1. Andora
2. Montenegro
3. Gibraltar
4. Czechia
5. San Marino

The U.S. ranks 9th worst in the world - the only country with more than 100 million population. There are three countries with population over 10 million but below 100 million on the list: Belgium (15th) and Portugal (11th), plus Czechia.

World's 5 worst impacted countries by the number of deaths per capita (the second table above), with ranks 1 = worst:

1. Gibraltar
2. San Marino
3. Czechia
4. Slovenia
5. Belgium

The U.S. ranks 12th in the world - the only country with more than 100 million population in the list of worst-impacted in terms of deaths per capita. Notably, there are two countries with population between 50 million and 99 million on the list of the worst impacted countries by deaths per capita: Italy (ranked 8th worst in the world), and the UK (ranked 6th worst in the world). There are further 4 countries on the list with population over 10 million, but less than 50 million: Belgium and Czechia already referenced above, plus Portugal (ranked 11th), and Span (ranked 14th).

Two tables above summarize key statistics for the countries with more than 250,000 cases of Covid19 recorded. The table also provides overall rankings for these countries in terms of their performance across three metrics: cases per capita, deaths per capita and deaths per case.

Notably, ten worst countries based on these combined metrics are (once again, rank = 1 implies the worst overall performance):

1. Belgium
2. UK
3. Italy
4. Hungary (tied with Italy)
5. Portugal
6. Czechia
7. Spain
8. U.S.
9. Bulgaria (tied with U.S.)
10. Peru

Across major regions:

Note: in the above table, regions are ranked as countries, though countries' rankings do not include regions. Thus, if the EU27 was treated as a country, it would rank 19th worst in the list of countries. If we remove EU27 member states from the list, the EU27 itself would rank 9th worst in the list, just below the U.S. which continues to perform worse than the EU27, but only marginally. 

Finally, countries' and groups' shares of deaths relative to their share of world population:

The U.S. is the second worst performing major country with its ratio of its share of world deaths to its share of world's population standing at 4.7. The UK is the worst, with a ratio of 5.6 and the EU27 third worst with a ratio of 3.8. 

14/2/21: COVID19 Update: BRIICS

 In previous posts, I covered the latest data for weekly Covid19 pandemic dynamics for:

• Global data and trends: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/02/14221-covid19-update-worldwide-data.html;
• European & EU27 data and trends: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/02/14221-covid19-update-europe-and-eu27.html; and
• Data and trends for the most impacted countries and regions: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/02/14221-covid19-update-most-impacted.html.

Now, let's take a closer look at the pandemic dynamics in the BRIICS (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa).

In broadly defined terms, there is an ongoing decline in both new cases and new deaths over the last week across all BRIICS. That said, it is too early to call the peaking of the second wave of this pandemic in terms of deaths counts, since weekly counts remain extremely high and show only one week of sustained declines. The good news is that last week's declines were evident in all BRIICS. Another good news is that we now have at least four consecutive weeks of declines in new cases across the entire group, except for Indonesia, where we only have one week of declines, and China. 

A summary table:

14/2/21: COVID19 Update: Most impacted countries

 

Previous posts on the COVID19 update covered global numbers and trends (https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/02/14221-covid19-update-worldwide-data.html) and European & EU27 trends (https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/02/14221-covid19-update-europe-and-eu27.html).

Here are some comparatives across all countries with the highest rates of detected infections (> 5% of population):

Note: I highlighted countries with > 10 million population.

Another way of looking at this is to take countries with more than 250,000 confirmed cases, as presented in the next set of tables:

Comparing regions to the above countries:

And looking at the countries by population relatives:

The table above really drives home the depth of the crisis in Europe and the U.S. U.S. accounts so far fo 20 percent of global deaths, having just 4.3 percent of the global population. This gives the U.S. second worst ratio of its share of global deaths to its share of world population. Only the UK exceeds the U.S. in this horrific metric. The EU27 fall in the third place, below the U.S. with 21.4% of the world's deaths and 5.8% of the global population. 

2/1/21: Covid19 update: BRIICS

 In previous posts, I covered Covid-19 updates for the last week of 2020 for:

• Worldwide trends: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/01/2121-covid19-update-worldwide-numbers.html;
• Europe and the EU27: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/01/2121-covid19-update-europe.html; and
• Countries with more than 250,000 cases: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/01/2121-covid19-update-countries-with-250k.html.

Cumulative data for BRIICS (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa) shows continued steady expansion of the pandemic in total cases and deaths:

• Currently, BRIICS account for 28.2% of all cases of Covid-19 in the world, and 25.3% of all deaths. This compares to these countries accounting for 45.3% of the world population.
• The pandemic has been relatively benign for this group of countries. If BRIICS were ranked as a stand-alone country within the group of 40 countries with more than 250,000 cases, BRIICS would have ranked 38th worst in terms of cases per 1 million of population, 37th worst in terms of deaths per capita, and 28th in terms of deaths per case. 
• BRIICS data, however is highly heterogeneous by country: 
• Brazil ranks 11th worst-hit country in the world in terms of infections rate, death rate per capita and mortality rate; 
• Russia ranks 28th;
• India ranks 38th;
• Indonesia 31st;
• China is unranked (officially, the country has fever than 250,000 cases, although overall robustness of the Chinese data is highly questionable); and
• South Africa ranks 22nd worst.
• No BRIICS country enters the league of 22 countries most-impacted by the pandemic (defined as countries with infection rate of 4% of population and higher).

Most current summary of key stats is below:

Now, to dynamics and trends.

BRIICS weekly case numbers are on the sustained rise, once again, since the trough achieved in week 45 which marked the end of the Wave 1 and the start of Wave 2 of the pandemic:

India and Brazil are showing robust and weakly-robust declines in weekly cases, while Russia and South Africa are showing robust increases. Other BRIICS are on a weak upward trend. Put frankly, my expectation is for a rise in India cases in weeks ahead as the new wave of the pandemic starts to take hold. Brazil being in a summer season is likely to have a longer lead time into the new wave.

Rather similar dynamics are taking place in deaths counts:

One key feature of the data is, of course, the clearly unreliable data from China that skews overall picture for the BRIICS group as a whole. If China's data was running at 0.75-0.9 of the average BRIICS rates, the country would have reported over 9.26 million cases (as opposed to the officially-reported 96,292 cases) and 183,400 deaths (compared to the officially-reported 4,771 deaths). It is worth noting here that these estimates reflect BRIICS rates that include official China statistics (downward bias to the estimates). What is quite amazing is not the actual numbers themselves, but the nearly total silence on the state of the Chinese statistics in much of the Western media, despite the order of differences between China and other BRIICS. Take a look at the comparative table here:

Russian stats: scrutinized left, right and center on every op-ed and news page of all major media outlets in the West are pretty much bank-on as expected: worse than average in infection rates, worse than average in deaths per capita, roughly (statistically) below average in terms of mortality rate. Similar for India. China's data is a complete and total outlier, and yet not a peep from the mainstream news. 

2/1/21: Covid19 update: Countries with > 250K cases

 

In previous posts, I covered worldwide trends for Covid19 pandemic evolution (https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/01/2121-covid19-update-worldwide-numbers.html) and pandemic developments in Europe and the EU27 (https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/01/2121-covid19-update-europe.html). Here, let's take a look at the set of countries with more than 250,000 confirmed cases.

As of week 52 of 2020, there were 40 countries in this group, accounting for 90 percent of the world total number of cases, 92 percent of the global deaths and 64 percent of the world's population. 

Tables below provide summary statistics for these countries:

You can click on the charts to magnify them.

The same data reported by regions and continents:

And a table of summary statistics:

Some noteworthy observations from the above:

• The U.S. is the worst performing major advanced economy when it comes to the pandemic trends: it ranks 2nd worst in the world in terms of its numbers of Covid19 cases per 1 million of population, 7th worst in the world in terms of its death rate per capita, but a reasonably-benign 25th in the world in mortality rate (deaths per positive test case). Using the three metrics mentioned, the U.S. ranks 6th worst performing country in the league of all countries with > 250,000 cases.
• The UK ranks even worse than the U.S. The country ranks 15th worst in the world in the rate of infections (Covid19 positive tests per capita), and 5th worst in deaths per capita and deaths per positive case. Across all three metrics, the UK ranks third worst in the world.
• Belgium ranks the worst major country in overall pandemic impact terms (cases per capita, deaths per capita and deaths per case), followed by Italy in the second place. The UK, as mentioned above ranks the third, Spain forth, Peru fifth, the US and Argentina tied in the sixth place, Hungary comes in 8th, Czechia 9th and France 10th. Thus, six out of the 10 worst hit countries in the world are EU27 members.
• In mortality terms (deaths per 1,000 cases), Mexico is the worst-performing country with 88.42 deaths per 1,000 positive cases; followed by Iran (45.56), Peru (37.19), Italy (35.12) and the UK (30.52). Overall, only 6 countries have mortality rates > 30 per 1,000 positive tests.
• There were 7 countries with more than 1,000 deaths per 1 million of population, and only 4 countries with infection rate of > 50,000 cases per 1 million of population.

Another summary table, showing relative contributions of each country to global cases and deaths, as well as their relative shares of total global population:

The above highlights once again the severity of the pandemic in the U.S., the UK and the EU27.