Bioinformatic modelling of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic with a focus on country-specific dynamics

One of the seminal events since 2019 has been the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Countries have adopted various policies to deal with it, but they also differ in their socio-geographical characteristics and public health care facilities. Our study aimed to investigate differences between epidemiological parameters across countries.

The analysed data represents SARS-CoV-2 repository provided by the Johns Hopkins University. Separately for each country, we estimated recovery and mortality rates using the SIRD model applied to the first 30, 60, 150, and 300 days of the pandemic. Moreover, a mixture of normal distributions was fitted to the number of confirmed cases and deaths during the first 300 days. The estimates of peaks' means and variances were used to identify countries with outlying parameters.

For 300 days Belgium, Cyprus, France, the Netherlands, Serbia, and the UK were classified as outliers by all three outlier detection methods. Yemen was classified as an outlier for each of the four considered timeframes, due to high mortality rates. During the first 300 days of the pandemic, the majority of countries underwent three peaks in the number of confirmed cases, except Australia and Kazakhstan with two peaks.

Considering recovery and mortality rates we observed heterogeneity between countries. Liechtenstein was the "positive" outlier with low mortality rates and high recovery rates, at the opposite, Yemen represented a "negative" outlier with high mortality for all four considered periods and low recovery for 30 and 60 days.