Coronavirus: Looking for Patterns?

As India nears the completion of Week 1 of a nationwide Coronavirus lockdown, in places like Bangalore, one can see folks cite what other countries are doing and suggesting we do the same in our apartment complexes. Are they justified? Or over-reacting? Are the countries being compared, well, comparable?

First, let me call out my source for the analysis below. It’s this site that captures Coronavirus stats from all countries. It captures infection counts, recoveries, deaths and active cases on a daily basis and also plots graphs of the same over the last few weeks and months.

On some topics, I do see patterns across countries. On others, hardly. And in yet others, patterns seem limited to race (Asians, Europeans etc), or to population size, or to climate. But the key is that one can’t be sure and no pattern is universal… yet I find most people talk as if there is certainty on all such matters.

Take China and South Korea: only 4.2% and 2.9% of infected cases have resulted in death. Contrast that with the far higher death rates of Italy (44.7%), USA (40.8%), and Spain (32.7%). Does the disease kill whites preferentially? But that doesn’t align with Germany’s low death rate of 4.9%.

Another pattern I noticed is that the death rates are high in most countries to begin with, then settle at a lower number. Is that because countries take some time to learn to deal with things? If yes, why aren’t Italy and Spain’s death rates lower after so long? Conversely, if a country’s healthcare system gets overwhelmed, the death rates should increase with time. But that’s not happening in almost any country, including Italy and Spain. So what’s going on?

And what does the above pattern mean for India? Our death rate is 22.2% and we’re still in Stage 2. Regardless of the reason, if the pattern holds, does this mean our death rate will settle at a much lower number?

Does a country’s approach matter? Japan and South Korea went into lockdown mode early and did a lot of testing, and their infection count and death rates dropped. The UK started with a let-it-play-out approach and its death rate is very high (88.3%).

Can every country even do lockdowns? Or are the governments and citizens of some countries used to imposing and following lockdowns, while also making essentials available? Like China and Singapore? Is Israel used to such measures as they’re always on high alert? Are freer, richer countries in unchartered waters and thus less willing and less capable of implementing lockdowns?

Why isn’t the virus ravaging the poorer parts of the world, from Asia to Africa to South America? Is it because most of the symptoms are that of the cold and nobody bothers about such things in poor countries? And thus they never get reported or counted as Coronavirus cases or deaths? Or is it that the poor, used to crowded areas, have far better immune systems?

And does climate have a big role here? Does the virus do significantly worse in hotter areas? That would certainly explain the lower infection counts and death rates of much of South East Asia, India, the Middle East and Africa. It would also explain the low death rates of two white countries: Australia and New Zealand (Being in the southern hemisphere, they’ve had summer all this while).

Sorry, but there are no clear answers here. But for that very reason, we in India shouldn’t be reacting to every event and action in the West. Maybe whatever we see there is a sign of things to come in India, maybe it isn’t. Instead, for now at least, we should look East, at the 3 countries which seem to have gotten the epidemic under control: China, Japan and South Korea. But is that something we Indians can do? Or will we, by force of habit, continue to only look West?