This paper introduces new methods to analyze the changing progression of COVID-19 cases to deaths in different waves of the pandemic. First, an algorithmic approach partitions each country or state's COVID-19 time series into a first wave and subsequent period. Next, offsets between case and death time series are learned for each country via a normalized inner product. Combining these with additional calculations, we can determine which countries have most substantially reduced the mortality rate of COVID-19. Finally, our paper identifies similarities in the trajectories of cases and deaths for European countries and U.S. states. Our analysis refines the popular conception that the mortality rate has greatly decreased throughout Europe during its second wave of COVID-19; instead, we demonstrate substantial heterogeneity throughout Europe and the U.S. The Netherlands exhibited the largest reduction of mortality, a factor of 16, followed by Denmark, France, Belgium, and other Western European countries, greater than both Eastern European countries and U.S. states. Some structural similarity is observed between Europe and the United States, in which Northeastern states have been the most successful in the country. Such analysis may help European countries learn from each other's experiences and differing successes to develop the best policies to combat COVID-19 as a collective unit.
This paper introduces new methods to study the changing dynamics of COVID-19 cases and deaths among the 50 worst-affected countries throughout 2020. First, we analyse the trajectories and turning points of rolling mortality rates to understand at which times the disease was most lethal. We demonstrate five characteristic classes of mortality rate trajectories and determine structural similarity in mortality trends over time. Next, we introduce a class of \emph{virulence matrices} to study the evolution of COVID-19 cases and deaths on a global scale. Finally, we introduce \emph{three-way incons…
This paper compares and contrasts the spread and impact of COVID-19 in the three countries most heavily impacted by the pandemic: the United States (US), India and Brazil. All three of these countries have a federal structure, in which the individual states have largely determined the response to the pandemic. Thus, we perform an extensive analysis of the individual states of these three countries to determine patterns of similarity within each. First, we analyse structural similarity and anomalies in the trajectories of cases and deaths as multivariate time series. Next, we study the lengths …
By fitting a compartment ODE model for Covid-19 propagation to cumulative case and death data for US states and European countries, we find that the case mortality rate seems to have decreased by at least 80% in most of the US and at least 90% in most of Europe. These are much larger and faster changes than reported in empirical studies, such as the 18% decrease in mortality found for the New York City hospital system from March to August 2020 (Horwitz et al, Trends in Covid-19 risk-adjusted mortality rates, J. Hosp. Med. 2020). Our reported decreases surprisingly do not have strong correlatio…
We prove that the refined approach -- our extension of the Yakovenko et al. formalism -- is universal in the sense that it describes well both household incomes in the European Union and the individual incomes in the United States for social classes of any income. This formalism allowed the study of the impact of the recent world-wide financial crisis on the annual incomes of different social classes. Hence, we indicate the existence of a possible precursor of a market crisis. Besides, we find the most painful impact of the crisis on incomes of all social classes.
Socio-Spatial Patterns of Suicide Mortality in the United States
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Old Dominion University（老道明大学）；Kaiser Permanente Northern California（凯撒永久北加州医疗中心）；University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Boston Children’s Hospital（波士顿儿童医院）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）
Pursuant to recommendations of the United Nations Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNISPACE III) and deliberations of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS), annual UN/European Space Agency workshops on basic space science have been held around the world since 1991. These workshops contributed to the development of astrophysics and space science, particularly in developing nations. Following a process of prioritization, the workshops identified the following elements as particularly important for international cooperation in t…
Several European countries have suspended the inoculation of the AstraZeneca vaccine out of suspicion of causing deep vein thrombosis. In this letter we report some Fermi estimates performed using a stochastic model aimed at making a risk-benefit analysis of the interruption of the delivery of the AstraZeneca vaccine in France and Italy. Our results clearly show that excess deaths due to the interruption of the vaccination campaign injections largely overrun those due to thrombosis even in worst case scenarios of frequency and gravity of the vaccine side effects.
The purpose of this paper is to use the votes cast at the 2019 European elections held in United Kingdom to re-visit the analysis conducted subsequent to its 2016 European Union referendum vote. This exercise provides a staging post on public opinion as the United Kingdom moves to leave the European Union during 2020. A composition data analysis in a seemingly unrelated regression framework is adopted that respects the compositional nature of the vote outcome; each outcome is a share that adds up to 100% and each outcome is related to the alternatives. Contemporary explanatory data for each co…
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has caused significant mortality and morbidity worldwide, sparing almost no community. As the disease will likely remain a threat for years to come, an understanding of the precise influences of human demographics and settlement, as well as the dynamic factors of climate, susceptible depletion, and intervention, on the spread of localized epidemics will be vital for mounting an effective response. We consider the entire set of local epidemics in the United States; a broad selection of demographic, population density, and climate factors; and local mobility data, trackin…
We show that a large scale mass mortality results in increased numbers of suicides. As a case in point, we consider the influenza epidemic of October 1918 in the United States. In this month, suicides peaked at a level of over 4s (where s denotes the desaisonalized standard deviation of the suicide rate) which means that one would expect such a jump to occur merely by chance only once in several centuries. The mechanism that we propose to explain this effect relies on two steps (i) Mass mortalities break family bonds for instance between parents and children or husbands and wives. (ii) Increas…
We use the United Nations COMTRADE database for analysis of the multiproduct world trade network. With this data, considered for years 2012-2018, we determined the world trade impact of the Kernel of EU 9 countries (KEU9), being Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, considered as one united country. We apply the advanced Google matrix analysis for investigation of the influence of KEU9 and show that KEU9 takes the top trade network rank positions thus becoming the main player of the world trade being ahead of USA and China. Our network analysis pro…
In a general way at all ages and for almost all diseases, male death rates are higher than female death rates. Here we report a case in which the opposite holds, namely for tuberculosis (TB) mortality between the ages of 5 and 25, female death rates are about two times higher than male rates. What makes this observation of interest is that it occurs in all countries for which data are available (e.g. Britain, Switzerland and United States), and in all years from the end of the 19th century up to the time in the 1960s when TB became a very rare disease in all developed countries. The fact that …
The Brexit referendum on the United Kingdom membership of the European Union took place on 23 June 2016. On the basis of a 52-48 split, statements such as: the majority of the UK chose to leave the EU, or the British people have voted to leave the European Union, or the will of the British people is to leave the EU, have pervaded political discourse and newspaper articles. In a recent paper, the authors present scientific arguments to contend that all those statements are without basis. They point out the fundamental issues with the Brexit referendum, which lie in how the data was summarized, …
The Covid-19 has presented an unprecedented challenge to public health worldwide. However, residents in different countries showed diverse levels of Covid-19 awareness during the outbreak and suffered from uneven health impacts. This study analyzed the global Twitter data from January 1st to June 30th, 2020, seeking to answer two research questions. What are the linguistic and geographical disparities of public awareness in the Covid-19 outbreak period reflected on social media? Can the changing pandemic awareness predict the Covid-19 outbreak? We established a Twitter data mining framework ca…
In late-2020, many countries around the world faced another surge in number of confirmed cases of COVID-19, including United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, United States, etc., which resulted in a large nationwide and even worldwide wave. While there have been indications that precaution fatigue could be a key factor, no scientific evidence has been provided so far. We used a stochastic metapopulation model with a hierarchical structure and fitted the model to the positive cases in the US from the start of outbreak to the end of 2020. We incorporated non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) into this…
Biologists have found that the death rate of cells in culture depends upon their spatial density. Permanent "Stay alive" signals from their neighbours seem to prevent them from dying. In a previous paper (Wang et al. 2013) we gave evidence for a density effect for ants. In this paper we examine whether there is a similar effect in human demography. We find that although there is no observable relationship between population density and overall death rates, there is a clear relationship between density and the death rates of young age-groups. Basically their death rates decrease with increasing…
European singles charts are important part of the music industry responsible for creating popularity of songs. After modeling and exploring dynamics of global album sales in previous papers, we investigate patterns of hit singles popularity according to all data (1966-2015) from weekly charts (polls) in 12 Western European countries. The dynamics of building popularity in various national charts is more than the economy because it depends on spread of information. In our research we have shown how countries may be affected by their neighbourhood and influenced by technological era. We have als…
Recent news reports claim that China is overtaking the United States and all other countries in scientific productivity and scientific impact. A straightforward analysis of high-impact papers in astronomy reveals that this is not true in our field. In fact, the United States continues to host, by a large margin, the authors that lead high-impact papers. Moreover, this analysis shows that 90% of all high-impact papers in astronomy are led by authors based in North America and Europe. That is, only about 10% of countries in the world host astronomers that publish "astronomy's greatest hits".
We have investigated the product life-cycles of almost 17 000 hit singles performed on the 12 biggest national phonographic markets in Europe including: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. We have considered weekly singles charts from the last 50 years (1966-2015) in each country. We analyze the spread of hit singles popularity (chart topping) as an epidemiological process performed on various European countries. Popular hit singles are contagious from one country to another. Thus, we consider time delays be…
In this paper, we estimate the impact of national lockdown on COVID-19 related total and daily deaths, per million people, in select European countries. In particular, we compare countries that imposed a nationwide lockdown (Treatment group); Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, United Kingdom (UK), and the US, to Sweden (Control group) that did not impose national lockdown using a changes-in-changes (CIC) estimation model. The key advantage of the CIC model as compared to the standard difference-in-difference model is that CIC allows for mean and variance of the outcomes t…
