Corona Pandemic from Statistical point of view
Dr. Suhilah Najim Abdullah
Public Administration Department
Cihan University - Erbil
Viruses and the diseases they cause, often have different names. Viruses are named based on their genetic structure to facilitate the development of diagnostic tests, vaccines and medicines. Diseases are named to enable discussion on disease prevention, spread, transmissibility and treatment. The official names of the virus responsible for COVID - 19 and the disease it causes:
Virus Sever Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS - COV - 2)
Disease Coronavirus disease (COVID - 19)
The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) announced SARS - COV -2 as the name of the new virus on 11 February 2020. This name was chosen because the virus is genetically related to the Coronavirus responsible for the SARS outbreak of 2003. Although they are related but the two viruses are different. From my point of view as a Statistician the spread of this pandemic disease is so important, the Total Confirmed cases (TC) is exponentially distributed for period of time (t) and (λ) is the scale parameter of this distribution, this parameter play big role in determining the rapid spread and the affected cases by COVID-19. We can call this parameter (spread parameter) or ( infection parameter), in this case the number of affected cases will be raised or controlled depending on the value of λ , which mean flatting the model of spreading the Pandemic, such model was used by China and South Korea. They manage to reduce the spread parameter achieving disaster recovery by using strict quarantine very early. The curves of each China and Korea starting to decline after 2 weeks as shown in figure ( 1 ) and ( 2 ) below .
For another example like Italy the most disaster area in the world they manage in somehow to reduce λ from 0.145 on 22 of March to 0.08 on 4th of April , but this value still high as shown from the curve in figure ( 3 ) below.
For Iraq the spread parameter λ was 0.1122 on 31 of March (the red curve) which is large, it reduced to 0.1027 during the first three days of April (the blue curve) which happened after the quarantine. The value of λ still high , if the Iraqi government could not control it by many and different ways (strict quarantine, providing medical services, preventing residential gathering, health advices, strict follow up) within two weeks , otherwise it will be huge disaster, figure (4) represent that.
