Agility+

The process of combating the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light a number of complicated choices that stakeholders have had to make along the way, often with a lack of clarity on what the right choice is. Protecting livelihoods vs. saving lives, to lockdown or to test faster, which vaccines to equip the population with, which segments to immunise first, and so on. We go through some of these and offer our own hypothesis answers to each, supported by facts and data to sugge

In the last 6 months we have witnessed a scramble by all countries to immunise their populations against COVID-19. Given the collective race, country vaccine portfolios as they are today are thus much more a function of supply availability, rather than conscious curation. Europe for example granted first emergency use authorisation to Pfizer in late 2020, earlier than other options, in large part due to it having concluded clinical trials ahead of the rest. While there is a c

There have been several initiatives in the US around collating relevant and critical social, economic and healthcare data to help stakeholders manage the COVID-19 crisis. One such area in need of close attention is that of economic recovery from the destructive effects of harsh lockdowns that were put in place around mid-March. The hope is that with relevant data in hand, decision makers, the general public and other relevant parties would not only be able to closely track th

The data provided by Google and Apple for the purposes of tracking changes in mobility during this COVID-19 crisis have been useful to gauge, at a high level, how our physical movement habits have changed due to implemented movement controls and lock-downs. We dive deeper into these datasets, to more deeply understand how mobility habits have changed, and extract more information that could be useful to gauge the efficacy of COVID-19 related interventions. #COVID #analytics T

This article is Part II of a previous article published on the subject of lock-downs due to COVID-19. We further explore data from Apple's COVID-19 Mobility report to glean useful insights that can help better predict the virus' infection trajectory, and help inform decisions on interventions that may be more or less effective. #analytics #COVID TL;DR version Isolation, social distancing, and in effect, entirely inhibiting mobility is by far the single most effective way to

In a previous article here we explored how COVID-19 testing may unknowingly provide a misguided and underestimated view of how the virus is spreading within the population of each country. In conducting the analysis required, we arrived at a credible method to model the evolution of infections and deaths from a single wave of COVID-19 spread and found that the growth to be appropriately modelled by three distinct phases: initial growth, decline during lock-down, and a residua

As we continue to analyse the spread of COVID-19 across different countries, we have noticed a widely varying impact from country to country in terms of total case detection and deaths. In this article, we analyse and correlate online web search trends with the COVID-19 case statistics, to determine if there was timely and consistent public awareness of the on-going pandemic from country to country. The hypothesis here is that a more 'clued in' and informed public would likel

The toll that the world is facing due to the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating; more than 100,000 people are now dead and thousands more continue to die each day. The US has projected that deaths from the first wave alone will reach the range of 60-200,000 across the country; while hard hit countries Italy, Spain and France, have reached death figures reaching 15,000 respectively as at time of writing. Meanwhile the virus spread has sent shockwaves to the capital market