Covid-19 Analytics: 18-01-21 featuring Israel

Here we present our exclusive analysis of the impact of Covid-19 on eight countries plus the entire World. We have followed daily infection rates since the start of the pandemic to the present day. Waves of infection brought about the conditions for an effective cooling of the virus. We seek to explore this relationship to better understand how the virus can be defeated.

This update follows on from that published on January 11.

How to interpret the charts

Our analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic treats the virus like a gas that is expanding through the world. Molecules of gas collide during expansion and these events are analogous to the social contact between people. Further background can be found in an introductory article to the Chief-Exec.com Covid Analytics platform.

A virus needs energy to reproduce and propagate, which it draws from the people it infects. Energy will only flow to the virus when this is colder than its supply – heat flows from hot to cold. We can estimate a temperature for the virus itself, not the infected person, using a measure we call MB Temp.

When MB Temp is below 111, a level which is shown as a dashed line on the charts below, the epidemic expands. Above 111, energy flow is suppressed leading to a fall in the number of daily infections, shown on the charts by thin blue lines following the left axis.

Colder viral temperatures may also lead to a phase change, like a gas becoming a liquid, shown as the change from the brown to the cooler red dots on the charts. The latter mark episodes of exponential growth of the epidemic. It is by finding new people to infect that the virus is able dissipate the energy it receives and to cool itself.

All barriers that inhibit infection, from mask wearing and social distancing to lockdowns and vaccines, reverse this viral cooling effect. To varying degrees these measures increase MB Temp and when this passes through the 111 threshold, the expansion of the epidemic goes into reverse. The higher the MB Temp is, the sharper is the drop off of daily infections.

To estimate MB Temp for a country or region, we take 25 days of infection data and fit to this our computer simulation of infections with the consequential energy flows into the virus. There is always an error between real world data and such a simulation, but when this error is small and is a minimum for all possible simulations, the corresponding MB Temp is taken as the best estimate.

Each dot on the charts here therefore represents this best MB Temp estimate with the 25-day simulation started usually at five-day intervals.

The charts below show the relationship of the number of daily infections with MB Temp estimated from the beginning of the epidemic in each country and region analysed.

Featuring Israel

For four consecutive days last week, Israel chalked up over 1,000 daily new confirmed casses of Covid-19 per million people. Today, the country temporarily leads the world on this particular metric, according to Our World in Data.

The passage of Israel through the pandemic has been a roller coaster journey. There have been periods of softened constraints on society that led to further viral outbreaks, interspersed with periods of strict confinement, which raised MB Temp values higher than in most other countries and which successfully and rapidly brought the epidemic under control. This history included the appearance of two deleterious Phase I transitions following the first lockdown.

Most recently, falling values of MB Temp over 80 days have seen the re-emergence of another vertiginous wave of the Covid-19 disease, with the effects of the third lockdown, which was put in place on December 27, possibly just becoming apparent in the latest MB Temp estimate. However, this has been accompanied by another record breaking performance with more than 20 per cent of its population of 9.29 million having so far received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.