On 8 June 2020 the BBC website reported that New Zealand is COV19 free and as a result it went into tier one of their country’s tier system. Going into tier one meant that New Zealand could resume normal operations without any restrictions.
The advice given to travellers going to New Zealand is that its border is closed to almost all arrivals and the people who are allowed into the country are required to quarantine for two weeks and are not allowed out of quarantine until they are free of the virus.
Because New Zealand is in tier one and the UK is in tier four, I thought it would be a good idea to look at this country’s COV19 statistics in an effort to derive any additional information as to why this country was able to free itself from the constraints imposed by the pandemic.
In order to conduct my analysis, I used the Our World in Data website’s csv file that contains statistics on 192 countries. This csv file is updated every day, so it needs to be reloaded into the system every day that it is used. The link to Our World in Data’s csv file is:- https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-source-data
I have written the code for this program in Python in Google Colab, a free on-line Jupyter Notebook.
I used coding to filter out the UK from the the csv file that I read and printed out. By looking at the dataset, I was able to gain some information from the statistics that are recorded for that country:-
I also used coding to filter out New Zealand’s statistics and I was able to obtain some information from looking at the basic data for that country:-
I compared the two statistics of the UK and New Zealand, which is recorded below:-
The main difference between the UK and New Zealand is the population and the population density. The population density of the UK is 15 times greater than that of New Zealand, and I feel that is part of the reason why New Zealand is able to keep COV19 at pay why the UK seems to be struggling to stay on top of the situation. Because New Zealand is not as densely populated as the UK, it is much easier for the country to adopt a policy of social distancing, which goes a long way in deterring the virus from spreading.
I compared the ratio of new cases to deaths for both the UK and New Zealand and found that the ratio in the UK is generally much higher than New Zealand:-
I compared the UK’s new cases to New Zealand’s new cases and found that the UK’s new cases are increasing due to the more highly infection mutation of the COV19 strain coming out of the UK. New Zealand’s rate, however, has stayed significantly lower than the UK.
I compared the UK’s new deaths to New Zealand’s new deaths and this variable too has a large gap. The UK’s deaths caused by the virus are increasing while New Zealand’s deaths have remained consistently low:-
In summary, the main difference between the UK and New Zealand, which I feel has contributed to New Zealand’s very low incidence of COV19 in their country is the fact that the country is not very densely populated. Because the people are spaced out more than the UK, there is less likelihood that the virus will spread.
New Zealand’s very strict lockdown procedures helped to clear the virus from the country and the fact that all people coming into the country have to quarantine for two weeks is a huge help in fighting this virus.
The code for this post can be found in its entirety in my personal GitHub account, the link being found here:- COV19/COV19_Compare_UK_&_New_Zealand.ipynb at main · TracyRenee61/COV19 (github.com)