Whether it’s confirmed cases, deaths, testing, or ICU beds, we’re inundated with data on COVID-19. In fact, it’s hard to keep track of which countries are improving and which are not. We try to stay on top of developments with our daily COVID tracker but even then, we could be missing the wood for the trees. Here, we take a step back and look at weekly changes in cases and deaths across all the major developed and emerging countries. This should give us a sense of momentum in the trends…
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Whether it’s confirmed cases, deaths, testing, or ICU beds, we’re inundated with data on COVID-19. In fact, it’s hard to keep track of which countries are improving and which are not. We try to stay on top of developments with our daily COVID tracker but even then, we could be missing the wood for the trees. Here, we take a step back and look at weekly changes in cases and deaths across all the major developed and emerging countries. This should give us a sense of momentum in the trends.
Let’s start with confirmed cases and look at the average of the past three days versus the same period a week ago. We find that Japan and the UAE have seen the biggest surge in cases (+250% or more, Chart 1). They’re followed by Russia, Mexico, India, Egypt, Pakistan and Singapore – all of which have seen daily cases more than double. At the other end of the spectrum, Australia, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Israel have all seen their cases halve.
We do the same exercise with reported COVID deaths. Here we find that Japan and Mexico have seen daily deaths jump by 400% (Chart 2). Australia, Hungary, Canada, Brazil, and Poland have also seen surges of around 200%. On the lower side, Taiwan, China, Malaysia and UAE have seen notable drops in deaths of between 60% to 100%.
The COVID hotspots, then, would be countries with big increases in both confirmed cases and reported deaths. On that metric, we find that Japan and Mexico stand out as the biggest hotspots in the world (Chart 3). The other hotspots would be Brazil, Poland, Colombia, India, South Africa and Egypt. Meanwhile, the “cold” spots would be Taiwan, China, Italy and Spain – all of which have seen declining daily cases and deaths.
It’s hard to sure of the exact causes of these groupings. Certainly, the “cold” spots are countries that suffered from COVID early on and have since introduced aggressive countermeasures. As for the hot spot countries, many of them were among the most relaxed towards the virus (e.g. Brazil, Mexico and Japan) and those which only recently introduced tighter containment measures. Needless to say, the hotspots are likely to shift towards other countries, so we’ll need to continue monitoring these trends. The critical one will be whether countries exiting containment measures become hotspot countries or not.
Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Editor of Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.
(The commentary contained in the above article does not constitute an offer or a solicitation, or a recommendation to implement or liquidate an investment or to carry out any other transaction. It should not be used as a basis for any investment decision or other decision. Any investment decision should be based on appropriate professional advice specific to your needs.)