Countries in Corona trouble

At this time of writing, there are three countries (Brazil, Russia and Singapore) in serious corona trouble (from the list of 21 countries I monitor). And it's interesting why this happens, while the rest of the world sees a bit of improvement towards recovery.

Double trends

Let's start with the bad news. And this is about a (dangerous) prediction.

You can see on the numbers (this case the cases), how long it takes (in days) to double the number of cases. I call it the Double Trends.

Brazil has a double trend of 6. What exactly does that mean in numbers:

In the above example, you see that April 2 2020, Brazil had 8,044 cases. Six days later, that number doubled. What that means for Brazil, Russia and Singapore is as follows:

The above image tells that if everything continue like it is now (every day a new record of newly infected people), that at the 14th of April (6 days later) the number of cases doubles from 16,188 to 32,376! And that doubles again at the 20th of April (12 days later) from 32,376 to 64,752!

The phase "Phase 1" indicates one of the two faces: Sickness and infections and phase 2 indicates recovery.

I can guarantee that this is and will not be reality. As you can see, the double trends per day changes over time:

But it functions like an indication that you can expect this to happen when nothing changes. For example that the country in question is not testing enough people and isolate those infected, and that the country isn't investing enough in their medical facilities.

Testing people who might have coronavirus

One of the things to fight the corona is finding out who are infected and isolate them as fast as possible. Many countries are really not investing in this because of various reasons. The ugliest cases are those countries, who really don't want to invest in that.

As you can see, a huge country (213 million) like Brazil is hardly taking time to invest in testing. That's probably one of the reasons why their record numbers of newly infected people popup every new day. Russia (146 million) is impressive in their efforts with testing 910,221 people. Singapore is a very small country with 5.8 million people, but they managed to test 1.11% of their population.

Cured and medical facilities

Hospitals and clinics are a key for fighting the pandemic. The other key (bigger one) is the self-isolation or those people who are ordered to stay at their home and not to leave until a certain period has passed and the final test must show that they don't have the coronavirus anymore. By default that's a period of 14 days (without any help of medicines). Japan and South Korea 'cheated' and allowed their isolated citizens take medicine, which helped to reduce the time they were isolated from 14 to 5 days.

And then there are the hospitals.

Projected cured are people, who suppose to be recovered or cured. When you have 100 people with coronavirus, a part of them dies, the other part are seriously sick and another part (by far the biggest) cure themselves within 14 days.

In the above image, you see three rows for Brazil, Russia and Singapore with the number of people cured and the recovering-rate. You see also the projected cured in numbers and percentage. If that percentage is negative, it means that they are behind schedule (under-performance). If it's positive, it's over-performance.

Sadly to say, that those three countries are really under-performing. And there are many reasons for that. But whatever those reasons, it's always locally based. Brazil is a huge country, from where many people live isolated by design; there are no medical facilities nearby. For Russia similar, only the corona is focused in their big cities, which have enough medical facilities. Both countries were late with their actions against the corona pandemic. Brazil started to have their cases at the 26th of February, but Russia had its first case at the 21st of January.

Singapore is a different case. They had it working fine for them with controlling the virus, but they received the second wave of new infections. You can see it on the recovery rate for that country (25%). Brazil 0.78% recovery rate and Russia has its recovery rate at 6.69%. Russia is really investing in fighting the corona pandemic the last weeks. You can see that clearly on the number of tests they have performed (910,221 tests).

Conclusion

There is a reason why some countries are performing poorly in the fight against the virus. Be it the way how they invest in medical facilities and resources, in the lack of testing, which result in the lack of isolation for the people with infections and allowing it to grow as it does with Brazil and Russia.