Backstory
I am taking a USP module called Developing meaningful indicators under Dr Charles Burke that involves creating an impact with the data that we have.Some of my classmates are analysing about acceptance of covid vaccines and it inspire me to look more into vaccine data. Since Singapore has been rolling out vaccinations in the month of January (https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/more-155000-spore-have-received-first-dose-covid-19-vaccine-4-had-severe-allergic), I was just curious about how well other countries are doing with their vaccinations. My hypothesis is that countries with higher infection rates should have higher vaccination rates since the government and citizens will/should be more concerned in prevention of spread of covid.
Choice of data
First indicator that I want to analyse is the vaccination rates of countries over the world. I went to world of data bank and realise that there are three different sets of data. First set of data is the number of daily doses of vaccines per hundred people. This seems acceptable to use for time series to provide insights of whether the take-up rate of vaccine is increasing. However, the issue with this data is that it does not differentiate whether it is the first dose or second dose of vaccine. Hence, I used the second of set of data instead- number of people who received at least one dose of vaccine per hundred people. The third of set data analyses on people who are fully vaccinated. This is not very relevant as not all countries have first-hand access to implement both doses by January.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
First analysis-Vaccination rates across the world
From the chart, as of 31 Jan 2021, the world has 0.71 people vaccinated with at least one dose of vaccine. For all countries with data collected, the vaccination rate has been increasing in the month of January, showing good sign of acceptance from the people all over the world. As of 31 Jan 2021, Singapore is slightly higher than the world average with 2.65. This is relatively remarkable as Singapore only started their first vaccination of public in mid January this year. I included United states as it is the country with highest number of Covid cases and I initially hypothesised that United states should have the highest vaccination rate because its situation is one of the worst. However, the two of the highest country is actually Gibraltar and Israel. I then realised that my comparison of indicator is wrong as this vaccination data is in percentage and I should look at covid infection percentage rather than total covid cases.
Analysis between covid cases and covid vaccinations
The countries included are limited to countries with vaccination data available. The limitation also includes the fact that the latest date of collection of data is not consistent(which may affect the reliability of the comparison). After arranging the datasets, I have managed to generate the top 10 for both covid cases percentage and covid vaccination percentage.
Based on the the picture above, only Gibraltar, United States of America and Israel appears in both of the leaderboards. Based on this alone, there seems to be low correlation between covid rates and vaccine rates. It would be understandable that if the top 10 countries are developing countries as they may not be able to afford purchase and implementation of vaccines. However, I find it really interesting because the top 10 countries for covid cases are mostly developed countries. Is this really because of distrust of vaccines or simply ignorance?
Next, i do a correlation analysis between covid cases and vaccination rates.
Based on the linear model, there is a positive correlation between covid cases and vaccination rate. However, the correlation is relatively weak with rsquared value of 0.152. This is worrying as vaccines are most critical to countries with high cases of covid as it can help to curb the spread of diseases. Countries all over the world with high covid cases need to analyse the reasons why vaccine take up rates are lower than they should and this weak correlation is a warning/reminder for them to take actions.
Conclusion
Covid-19 is here and the effects/evolution is undetermined. Every country has to do its part to curb the spread of covid. Especially for countries with higher rate of infection, they will need to implement vaccine much faster than other countries before it is too late for vaccination.
