Similarities among countries during the COVID-19 pandemic

Year 2022, Volume: 3 Issue: 2, 318 - 334, 22.08.2022

Özlem Akay

Abstract

On Jan 30, 2020, The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the current novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The new type of coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is a new virus among viruses under the name. The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has spread from China to 25 countries. This study aims to identify the countries that seem similar to each other by examining their situations during the COVID-19 process. For this purpose, cluster analysis was performed for 30 countries considering the total cases per million, total deaths per million, population over the age of 65, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, and hospital beds per 100k obtained from the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) website for the dates of 15 May 2020 and 23 January 2021. Partition coefficient, partition entropy, modified partition coefficient, silhouette, fuzzy silhouette, and Xie and Beni index were used to determine the optimal number of clusters a the optimal number of clusters was found to be 4. Thus, the countries were grouped into 4 clusters for both datasets. According to the results of the analysis, the similarities among the countries were evaluated by comparing their figures for both dates during the pandemic.

Keywords

COVID-19, countries, clustering, similarities

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