COVID-19 Pandemic Analysis for a Country’s Ability to Control the Outbreak Using Little’s Law: Infodemiology Approach

Yao-Hua Ho, Yun-Juo Tai and Ling-Jyh Chen
Additional contact information
Yao-Hua Ho: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei 11677, Taiwan
Yun-Juo Tai: Data Science Degree Program, College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica, Taipei 10617, Taiwan
Ling-Jyh Chen: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei 11677, Taiwan

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 10, 1-10

Abstract: Since the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), all countries across the globe have been trying to control its spread. A country’s ability to control the epidemic depends on how well its health system accommodates COVID-19 patients. This study aimed to assess the ability of different countries to contain the COVID-19 epidemic in real-time with the number of confirmed cases, deaths and recovered cases. Using the dataset provided by the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), we analyzed the spread of the virus from 22 January 2020 to 15 September 2020 and used Little’s Law to predict a country’s ability to control the epidemic. According to the average recovery time curve changes, 16 countries are divided into different categories—Outbreak, Under Control, Second Wave of Outbreak, and Premature Lockdown Lift. The curves of outbreak countries (i.e., U.S., Spain, Netherlands, Serbia, France, Sweden, and Belgium) showed an upward trend representing that their medical systems have been overloaded and are unable to provide effective medical services to patients. On the other hand, after the pandemic-prevention policy was applied, the average recovery time dropped in under control countries (i.e., Iceland, New Zealand, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore). Finally, we study the impact of interventions on the average recovery time in some of the countries. The interventions, e.g., lockdown and gathering restrictions, show the effect after 14 days, which is the same as the incubation period of COVID-19. The results show that the average recovery time ( T ) can be used as an indicator of the ability to control the pandemic.

Keywords: infodemiological; coronavirus; COVID-19; outbreak control; Queuing Theory; Little’s Law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/10/5628/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/10/5628/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:10:p:5628-:d:556729

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().