This is a short post on the Covid-19 growth rate. I want to highlight it as an important factor we also need to look at.

Disclaimer

I would like to start with a disclaimer: I am not a doctor. Nor do I have a formal medical qualification. This is not medical advice but simply my opinion on the data below. I take no responsibility on how you interpret the below information.

Most of us look at the daily confirmed cases of Covid-19 every day. What we see is that number increasing. While that is true, the daily confirmed cases is not the only thing we should focus on.

Growth rate

An important element to look at is the growth rate.  The growth rate is just the present - the past divided by the past. A simple explanation on growth rate can be found here. The growth rate will determine how "fast" something is growing.

Confirmed cases and Growth rate

I wanted to do chart of Covid-19 showing the confirmed cases and the growth rate. Like the previous post ,Causes of deaths 2020 vs Covid-19, I got the data from Kaggle. There are loads of data on Covid-19 and they are pretty well maintained. I could not find a data set with the growth rate so I just calculated it. I used Excel and Python to come up with the final product.

The chart

The chart shows data from 1 March 2020 to 1 June 2020. The confirmed cases show, what would appear, a steady upward curve. The growth factor on the other hand is decreasing which is a good sign. From this data we could make an assumption that the rate at which people are getting infected is slower.

Conclusion

The above is only for 3 months data. If countries do more testing than its highly probable that the cases will rise. When countries open their borders again then the number of cases will rise also. 3Blue1Brown did a excellent video on Exponential growth and epidemics focusing on Covid-19. He does a deep dive explaining exponential growth, the growth factor and the likely scenarios that the growth of the virus may stop. I highly recommend you watch his video.

That is all for now and I'll see you next time.

‍