Category Archives: #Indonesia

2/1/21: Covid19 update: BRIICS

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

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.