What is the importance to control the speed of spreading COVID-19?
COVID-19 is affecting lifestyle of people in the world. In many countries, people are/were required to stay at home by their governments. Since people started to stay, it has already passed several months. As of now, many people in the world have to be under the same situation still now. Perhaps, more time would be necessary by the time that COVID-19 pandemic can be settled down in the world. Many companies in the world are competing to develop treatment and vaccine for COVID-19 now, and it has recently been reported that some candidates were found and developed. We are looking forward to letting us good news of the developments as soon as possible.
COVID-19 information is being reported by many websites, mass medias, public organizations and individuals. As a good example, Avi Schiffmann who is a 17 years old man transmitting the COVID-19 information to the world is recently being noticed by people in the world. He is summarizing the COVID-19 information of the world every day voluntarily. As we can see from his website (https://ncov2019.live/data), the huge number of subjects have been affected, and were deceased in the world. Especially, people in United Stated, Spain and Italy deteriorated into a grave crisis, as reported by news.
https://www.businessinsider.com/high-school-student-avi-schiffman-made-a-coronavirus-tracker-2020-5
There are not only his website but also many other websites transmitting the information of COVID-19, so we can get the latest information anytime from the those websites. When I saw those in the website, I wondered if there is the difference in the trend of spreading COVID-19 among countries or not. Therefore, this time, I try to check the distributions of spreading COVID-19 infection in some countries. Fortunately, as source data related to COVID-19 can be downloaded in some websites, I used source data in “https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases" this time.
The following is showing the change rate from May-22nd of 2020 which means the change rate in COVID-19 cases on each date in the case that the cases on May-22nd of 2020 is regard as 100%. It is because it is necessary to do that all countries can be compared equivalently.
As you can see from the graph, the change rate in China is very high at the early phase. Additionally, the rates in Europe and USA are quite high similarly at the early phase. Although you may be thinking that Germany is a country which is controlling deterioration of COVID-19 by good medical system, the change rate in Germany is the same as those in other European countries. On the other hand, those in Taiwan and Japan are very low comparatively with other countries. That result shown in the graph is clarifying the reason why Taiwan is a country which was able to control spreading COVID-19 well. Although it is under controversy whether Japan can be told such a country as Taiwan or not, the number of cases and deaths are certainly low as a fact.
From these results, we can understand the importance of action during the early phase, in order to suppress pandemic, as said already by many infection experts. If the speed of spreading infection at the early phase can be kept low, the subsequent spreading can also be suppressed. In the case of focusing on the way to avoid pandemic (with ignoring of economy), it can be said that the most important thing is what we do as the first action.
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