Clustering of countries according to the COVID-19 incidence and mortality rates

Kimiya  Gohari; Anoshirvan  Kazemnejad; Ali  Sheidaei; Sarah  Hajari

doi:10.1186/s12889-022-13086-z

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Clustering of countries according to the COVID-19 incidence and mortality rates

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

Clustering of countries according to the COVID-19 incidence and mortality rates

Kimiya Gohari, Anoshirvan Kazemnejad, Ali Sheidaei and Sarah Hajari

BMC Public Health, Vol.22, pp.1-12

2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-13086-z

PMCID: PMC8972710

PMID: 35365101

Appears in COVID-19 Research

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Abstract

COVID-19

Trajectory

Clustering

Mortality rate

Incidence rate

Background: Two years after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic on December 29, 2021, there have been 281,808,270 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 5,411,759 deaths. This information belongs to almost 216 Countries, areas, or territories facing COVID-19. The disease trend was not homogeneous across these locations, and studying this variation is a crucial source of information for policymakers and researchers. Therefore, we address different patterns in mortality and incidence of COVID-19 across countries using a clustering approach. Methods: The daily records of new cases and deaths of 216 countries were available on the WHO online COVID-19 dashboard. We used a three-step approach for identifying longitudinal patterns of change in quantitative COVID-19 incidence and mortality rates. At the first, we calculated 27 summary measurements for each trajectory. Then we used factor analysis as a dimension reduction method to capture the correlation between measurements. Finally, we applied a K-means algorithm on the factor scores and clustered the trajectories. Results: We determined three different patterns for the trajectories of COVID-19 incidence and the three different ones for mortality rates. According to incidence rates, among 206 countries the 133 (64.56) countries belong to the second cluster, and 15 (7.28%) and 58 (28.16%) belong to the first and 3rd clusters, respectively. All clusters seem to show an increased rate in the study period, but there are several different patterns. The first one exhibited a mild increasing trend; however, the 3rd and the second clusters followed the severe and moderate increasing trend. According to mortality clusters, the frequency of sets is 37 (18.22%) for the first cluster with moderate increases, 157 (77.34%) for the second one with a mild rise, and 9 (4.34%) for the 3rd one with severe increase. Conclusions: We determined that besides all variations within the countries, the pattern of a contagious disease follows three different trajectories. This variation looks to be a function of the government's health policies more than geographical distribution. Comparing this trajectory to others declares that death is highly related to the nature of epidemy.

Details

Title: Clustering of countries according to the COVID-19 incidence and mortality rates
Authors: Kimiya Gohari (Author) - Tarbiat Modares University
Anoshirvan Kazemnejad (Corresponding Author) - Tarbiat Modares University
Ali Sheidaei (Author) - Tehran University of Medical Sciences
Sarah Hajari (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Business and Creative Industries
Publication details: BMC Public Health, Vol.22, pp.1-12
Publisher: BioMed Central
Date published: 2022
DOI: 10.1186/s12889-022-13086-z
ISSN: 1471-2458
PMID: 35365101; PMC8972710
Copyright note: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
Organisation Unit: School of Business and Creative Industries; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; School of Science, Technology and Engineering
Language: English
Record Identifier: 99622840302621
Output Type: Journal article

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