Coronavirus spread analysis in the first pandemic year

Abstract

The paper examines the characteristics of coronavirus spread in different countries around the world at the beginning of the pandemic, when effective vaccines have not yet been developed. The time interval analyzed is a year and a half from the beginning of 2020 to the summer of 2021. During this period, the spread of the disease was not yet significantly affected by the uneven vaccination process of the global population, and the external environment at that time was roughly the same throughout the world in terms of the lack of effective means to counteract the spread of the coronavirus. Based on open-source data on pandemic spread statistics by country (incidence, cure, mortality), applied statistics and data mining techniques identified groups of countries with different spread of the disease. Relative values of indicators, scaled to population size, and the dynamics of their change were analyzed. Estimates were made of the relationships between country-specific pandemic indicators and key demographic and socioeconomic indicators for these countries. These results may be useful for understanding the peculiarities of viral infections spread in different countries and regions of the world in the absence of effective countermeasures.