COVID19 Daily Infection Rates: “The Tale of Two Trends”

COVID19 Daily Infection Rates: The Top 25 Countries and Trends in the Data

“The Tale of Two Trends”

Richard Fiene, Ph.D.

July 2020

I have been monitoring the COVID19 daily infection rates since the Johns Hopkins University site was established (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html) and two very different trends in the data have clearly emerged over the past 6 months which I find very unsettling.

The two trends (daily cases trend line) are the following: 1) A very positive trend in that cases did spike but since the spike have decreased significantly and are either at a very low level or continue to decrease. This is a good trend and one we had hoped for early on when the pandemic was first identified. However, there is a second trend 2) A very negative trend in that cases did spike but have plateaued out and are not decreasing or they are still increasing. This is not what we wanted to see. I am not going to conjecture into why this has occurred but I only want to list the countries in these two groups because maybe we can learn from the Group 1 countries.

I looked at the top 25 countries with the highest COVID19 daily infection rates in the aggregate (Total Confirmed Cases). Unfortunately, the majority of countries are in Group 2 (Negative Result)(n = 18) rather than in Group 1 (Positive Result)(n = 7).

Group 1 (+ Result) = UK, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Canada, China.
Group 2 (- Result) = US, Iran, Brazil, Russia, India, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Bangladesh, Columbia, Qatar, Sweden, Egypt, Argentina.

So what is so different about these two groups of countries’ approaches. Can we learn from Group 1. On the surface they look like a very diverse group from three different areas of the world. Please keep in mind that I only looked at the top 25 countries because they had the largest number of confirmed cases. However, when you analyze the data from all 188 affected countries the two trend lines hold up so again we could continue to search out the Group 1 countries and find out what is different about their approach because it appears to be working a lot better than the Group 2 countries.

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Richard Fiene, Ph.D., Research Psychologist, Research Institute for Key Indicators (RIKIllc), rfiene@rikinstitute.com, http://rikinstitute.com.

About Dr Fiene

Dr. Rick Fiene has spent his professional career in improving the quality of child care in various states, nationally, and internationally. He has done extensive research and publishing on the key components in improving child care quality through an early childhood program quality indicator model of training, technical assistance, quality rating & improvement systems, professional development, mentoring, licensing, risk assessment, differential program monitoring, and accreditation. Dr. Fiene is a retired professor of human development & psychology (Penn State University) where he was department head and director of the Capital Area Early Childhood Research and Training Institute.

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