Trends in COVID-19 prevalence and mortality: A year in review

Nick James; Max Menzies

doi:10.1016/j.physd.2021.132968

Trends in COVID-19 prevalence and mortality: A year in review

Physica D. 2021 Nov:425:132968. doi: 10.1016/j.physd.2021.132968. Epub 2021 Jun 7.

Authors

Nick James¹, Max Menzies²

Affiliations

¹ School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
² Yau Mathematical Sciences Centre, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Abstract

This paper introduces new methods to study the changing dynamics of COVID-19 cases and deaths among the 50 worst-affected countries throughout 2020. First, we analyse the trajectories and turning points of rolling mortality rates to understand at which times the disease was most lethal. We demonstrate five characteristic classes of mortality rate trajectories and determine structural similarity in mortality trends over time. Next, we introduce a class of virulence matrices to study the evolution of COVID-19 cases and deaths on a global scale. Finally, we introduce three-way inconsistency analysis to determine anomalous countries with respect to three attributes: countries' COVID-19 cases, deaths and human development indices. We demonstrate the most anomalous countries across these three measures are Pakistan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Keywords: COVID-19; Epidemiology; Nonlinear dynamics; Population dynamics; Time series analysis.