A quick look at COVID-19 in Australia

How Australia is performing in cases, deaths and testing

Catherine Lopes Ph.D.
Towards Data Science
7 min readApr 25, 2020

Pixabay

COVID-19 has disrupted the entire world and impacted almost everything in our life. Although Australia is a “big island” far away from everywhere, it did not escape the pandemic declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on March 11th. Since the coronavirus outbreak was reported in Dec 2019 from Wuhan China, it has spread to a global crisis in a few months.

As of 15th April 2020, the total number of confirmed cases around the world has reached 1.98 million with the number of deaths exceeded 126,600. Australia recorded 6,440 confirmed cases and 63 deaths. To understand the COVID-19 in Australia compared to other countries in the world, we investigated the data comparing Australia with other countries in terms of volume, speed, and testing.

Data

We used time series and population datasets from the Humanitarian Data Exchange ( HDE). It contains the numbers of cases recorded from 22nd January, which is compiled by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.

  • Data sets that track the number of people affected by COVID-19 worldwide including the cases of confirmed, recovered and deaths.
  • Data sets that track the number of tests have been conducted by countries.

Given that the datasets from HDE don’t have data for China prior to 22nd January, we used data for China recorded cases from 1st to 21st January sourced from “The Epidemiological Characteristics of an Outbreak of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Diseases (COVID-19) — China, 2020” (Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, CCDC Weekly / Vol. 2 / No. x”).

Compare Australia to countries that had COVID-19 cases earlier or at the same time

On 26 Jan 2020 Australia recorded its first confirmed case. There are a total of 12 countries reported COVID-19 cases before or at the same time as Australia. Except for China, all other 11 countries are on a similar scale in terms of the number of cases (1–5) as reported from day 1. We mapped all the countries from their day 1 as shown in the figure below. On day 80 as of 15 April 2020, Australia was ranked 7th among these 13 countries with the number of confirmed cases, which places Australia in the middle of the countries.

USA, France, Canada are sharing the same turning point with Australia for sharp increase of number of cases after 30 days the 1st case introduced to the country. It is interesting to see that Canada and Australia are on the same trajectory until around Day 55 (25 Mar 2020). The stage 1 restriction was imposed on 23 March, and stage 2 happened a month later. Since then Canada continued their growth in term of numbers as USA and France, but Australia started to flat the curve.

Compared to a few others including Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam where the nationwide social distancing measures were introduced earlier, Australia certainly overtakes their speed in the 2nd month without measures managed by the government. However, we can see that the gap is getting narrower in the 3rd month while Australia spent big effort on flatting the curve.

Compare Australia to countries that had COVID-19 death earlier or at the same time

The first death case of Australia was recorded on 4th March. There are a total of 10 countries reported COVID-19 death before or at the same time as Australia. We mapped all the countries from their day 1 as shown in the figure below. Among these 11 countries, on the Day 46 as of 15 April 2020, Australia was ranked 9th among with the number of deaths, which places Australia at the bottom of the rank.

Countries like USA, Italy, and France went up right on the trajectory from the beginning of death have been reported and still on the rise entering the 2nd months, with a much larger volume and faster pace. It is interesting to see that Japan and Australia are sharing almost the same number of deaths on the trajectory.

Taiwan has a similar population as Australia with a much higher population density, but they managed to maintain an exceptionally low death toll. According to the director of infectious diseases at Taiwan’s National Health Research Institutes, Taiwan has imposed measures and leveraged their previous experience with SARS.

Compare Australia to countries that had more or the same confirmed cases

As of 15th April, which is day 80 for Australia since the 1st case confirmed, there are a total of 30 countries that have reported more confirmed cases than Australia. Given that there are already 6 countries which started COVID-19 earlier or the same time as Australia have more cases than Australia, the rest 24 countries are all started their 1st case in their country, but the number of cases increased much faster than Australia. For example, Turkey reached almost the same number of confirmed cases as China in a month. This large number of countries that developed more cases quicker than Australia could indicate that Australia acted early in controlling the spread in general.

Compare Australia to countries that had more or the same deaths

As discussed earlier that there are 10 countries reported the death earlier or the same time as Australia, among these 8 have more death than Australia. As of on 15th April, which is day 46 for Australia since the 1st case confirmed, there are another 43 countries reported more deaths than Australia in a short period of time from their 1st death reported. For example, Belgium reported almost the same number of deaths as China within a month instead of 2 months. Most of the 51 countries have a much steep trajectory in the number of deaths reported at a much faster pace. This could indicate that Australia health system is in a better condition or situation in dealing with the infected cases in general compared to other health care system in these countries.

Compare Australia to top-ranked countries for testing

Testing has become a critical measure in controlling the spread and determining the readiness for opening the country or ease the social distancing measure. To understand the position of Australia is in, we look at a snapshot data as of on 15th April, as shown in the figure below, Australia is ranked 8th in terms of the total number of tests have been conducted or recorded.

USA, Italy, France and United Kingdom share a similar ratio between the number of tests and the confirmed cases. These countries have done a large number of testing, but also have a very large number of confirmed cases. It is interesting to see that South Korea and Australia are sharing a closer similarity in terms of this ratio but with a large number of tests and a much smaller number of confirmed cases. It is worth mentioning that Australia is the one with the least number of deaths among these top countries doing a large amount of testing.

To compare Australia with the top 10 countries in the world in terms of testing per million of population, see figure below. Except for Germany and Italy, all other countries have dropped off from the top when the number of tests is considered per million of population. Overall, the number of total tests and the number of tests per million people in Australia have suggested that we are doing a fairly good job in testing compared to other countries.

Overall

As of on 15 Apr 2020, Australia has a total number of 6440 confirmed cases and total 63 deaths with a fatality ratio of 0.97%. This is much lower than the world average of 6.39%. It could not be possible without a world class health care system and the deployment of strict measures by the government. Of course, there are many other factors such as testing and financial packages and so on which made a lot of impact to flat the curve in Australia.

All of us are playing an important role to help Australia to battle with COVID-19 and stay together!

Gita Das is a researcher and developer in computer vision and machine learning. Gita and I share the same passion to explore data and gain insight with COVID-19 if we can helping people to understand COVID-19.

Feel free to access the GitHub repo and we welcome your feedback and comments.

This article is also available on LinkedIn post.

Note from the editors: Towards Data Science is a Medium publication primarily based on the study of data science and machine learning. We are not health professionals or epidemiologists, and the opinions of this article should not be interpreted as professional advice. To learn more about the coronavirus pandemic, you can click here.

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