Introduction

In thus post we go though the Real-time Covid 19 Data dataset. We will attempt to see if there is a link between Covid-19 death rate and population density. We will 1st focus on Namibia and it's neighbouring countries. After that we will focus on Namibia vs the rest of the world. The data is up to 23 June 2021.

Motivation

My main interest is to see how Namibia compares with its neighbouring countries and the world taking population density into consideration.

Dataset

This is a time series dataset listing confirmed cases, reported deaths and reported recoveries per country for Covid-19. There are 97,850 rows and 5 columns of data.

You can find my notebook here.

Data Preparation and Cleaning

The data is arranged in a good order so no cleaning was needed. The main preparing was calculating the death rate, merging dataset and grouping of countries per population density.

Research Question(s)

Question 1 : How does Namibia compare with her least dense populated neighbouring countries?

Question 2 : How does Namibia compare with her most dense populated neighbouring countries?

Question 3 : How does Namibia compare with the world's least dense populated countries?

Question 4 : How does Namibia compare with the world’s densest populated countries?

Methods

Simple arithmetic was used to calculate the death rate. Death rate = Deaths / Confirmed cases * 100.

Different datasets were created per country and then were merged for visualizations.

Since we are dealing with time series data the best way to visualize it would be a line chart.

Important terms

Death rate
Death rate or mortality rate is the measure of deaths for a particular population. It can be expressed as a percentage or deaths by 1,000. In our case, death rate is expressed as a percentage. So 3.5 means a death rate of 3.5% i. e. 3.5 deaths per 100 or 35 deaths per 1,000.

Population density
Population density is measured by the number of human inhabitants per square kilometer or square mile, and also sortable by total area and by population. - wikipedia.org

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Findings for question 1

How does Namibia compare with her least dense populated neighbouring countries? Chart below.

Namibia ranks 3rd out of the 4 countries with the Zambia has the best death rate of 1.25% so 12.5 deaths for every 1,000 confirmed cases.

Findings for question 2

How does Namibia compare with her most dense populated neighbouring countries? Chart below.

Namibia ranks 1st out of the 3 countries with the Zimbabwe having the worst death rate of 4.1% i. e. 41 deaths for every 1,000 confirmed cases.

Findings for question 3

How does Namibia compare with the worlds least dense populated countries?

Namibia is the 2nd least densely populated country on earth. You can check out the full list here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density.

Namibia ranks 3rd out of the 5 countries with the Iceland having the best death rate of 0.44%

Findings for question 4

How does Namibia compare with the world’s densest populated countries?

Below is a table containing most densely populated countries.

Namibia ranks the worst out of the 6 countries with the Singapore having the best death rate of 0.06%

Limitations

The findings are limited only to Covid-19 and it cannot be assumed that other viruses share the same results. The link between death rate and populations density are also limited to Namibian's neighbouring countries only.

Conclusions

It would appear that there is a link between death rate and population limited is to Namibian's neighbouring countries only. The denser countries on the population density map for Namibian's neighbouring countries have a much higher death rate. These findings were evident in research questions 1 and 2.

The same cannot be said when comparing Namibia's death rate to the world's least and most densely populated countries. Although Namibia is one of the least densely populated countries, it has the worst death rate when compare to the top 5 countries in terms of population density.

References

Credit needs to go to :

Gaurav Dutta for the kaggledataset; and

wikipedia.org for definitions and images.