Here is another analytical study of the Coronavirus pandemic in 32 countries. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) and Sri Lanka have been excluded from this and further studies, as data from these 2 countries is also shabby and leads to unnecessary waste of time.
In this study, I point out the percentage of cases who have been tested positive, out of the total people tested in each of these 32 countries. Data for the total number of people tested is not available for Spain, Egypt and Nigeria, and therefore these 3 countries are at the bottom of the table, though that may not be the case in reality. All the other data is from as many as eight different sources, so I am not mentioning them for brevity.
For the 29 countries for which this data is available, the average percentage of cases tested positive is 11.12%. Even if we ignore a 30% variation from this average, or those with 7.78% to 14.46% positive cases (out of the people tested), it still excludes only 4 countries. This means that 25 of the 29 countries have either a very low percentage of positive cases or a very high percentage.
At the top (VERY HIGH PERCENTAGE) are Philippines, Italy, Indonesia, Netherlands, Iran, Austria, Switzerland, Pakistan, France, USA and Mexico. Hardly anything is common between these 11 countries – they are from varying regions/continents.
At the bottom (VERY LOW PERCENTAGE) are UAE, Russia, Vietnam, Australia, India, South Korea, China, Bangladesh, Brazil and Japan. It would not be surprising if four of these 10 countries (UAE, Russia, Vietnam, and China) were to be fudging data. In fact, Russia probably is, because even their death ratio is the second lowest amongst the 32 countries in the Table. Nor would it be surprising if the data from Bangladesh is wrong. But what about Australia, India, South Korea, Brazil and Japan? Again, nothing seems to be common between these 5 countries.
The data about Coronavirus / COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 is turning out to be as perplexing to a statistician like myself, just as the disease is to healthcare professionals.