Two Years of Covid-19: What’s the cost? — Singapore
With the rest of the world moving towards living with Covid-19, it feels like we are finally able to put Covid-19 behind us and gain back the freedom of living pre-Covid-19. However, how would Covid-19 look like in numbers? To find an answer to that question, I went onto “Our World In Data” and found a dataset with the numbers I needed. In this article, I will talk about some of my insights on what I have found and how I used MySQL to get to these numbers. These insights are mainly how Singapore had fared during the entire pandemic.
This Covid-19 analysis was done with some reference from a YouTube channel, Alex The Analyst, so a huge shoutout to him as well.
The code that I used may be found on this link: https://github.com/jingkai27/SQL-Projects/blob/main/covid_data_analysis_code.sql.
Reformatting the data
The entire dataset was extremely huge, so I split the dataset into two, one for death statistics and another for vaccination statistics. To do that, I opened the file in Microsoft Excel and separated them into two separate Excel windows. Do note that they must be kept in two separate windows, not tabs, to facilitate the conversion back to CSV files later. I did some reformatting on the dates to YYYY-MM-DD so that MySQL can recognize it as datetime. Once these are done, I exported them back to CSV files and imported them onto MySQL Workbench.
1. Total Cases vs Total Deaths
Being a Singaporean, I wanted to know what the probability of dying from Covid-19 was and how the probability fluctuated with time. To find the answer, I used SQL to derive a column with the date from the start of the pandemic (23rd January 2020) to the date of enquiry (24th April 2022), followed by total cases and total deaths recorded on each date. I created the last column to find the death percentage, which is derived from (total deaths / total cases)*100.
Once that was done, I got an entire list of the death percentage in Singapore for each day. I intend to work on this data with Tableau later to visualize the trend, but for now, I mainly want to focus on the data on the 24th April 2022. While Singapore has over 1.1 million cases, we have a relatively low death percentage at 0.11% and 1325 deaths only. Doing a relatively simple reference to the US, which has a death percentage of 1.22%, I would say that Singapore has done a pretty good job in handling the outbreak and keeping deaths low despite having a lot of cases for our small country.
2. Singapore’s Infection Rate
Knowing the previous statistic, I wanted to figure out what percentage of the population had gotten Covid-19. With a population of 5.45 million, I used MySQL to obtain a table with the total cases and percentage of total cases to population each day. I was surprised that about 21.7% of Singaporeans had Covid-19 by 24th April 2022. While there were many Singaporeans whom had gotten Covid-19, the death percentage was only 0.11%, demonstrating how effective Singapore’s healthcare system was in managing the Covid-19 situation.
3. Countries with Highest Infection Rates
Having had an idea of Singapore’s infection rate, I wanted to compare it with other countries. Using the MAX() function, I obtained the number of cases on the 24th April 2022 and used CAST() to convert the column total_cases into unsigned integers. Afterwards, I obtained the infection rates and ordered the table by the infection percentage in descending order. Out of 239 entries, Singapore was the 58th, which meant that Singapore was around the 75th percentile and had a relatively high infection rate. This was relatively surprising as I expected Covid-19 to be more infectious and had thought that Singapore was one of the countries with a relatively low infection rate.
4. Countries with Highest Death Rates from Covid-19
Nonetheless, with a death rate of 0.11%, Singapore came in as the 212th out of 239 entries. This result was expected as Singapore’s death rate was considerably low.
All in all, Singapore fared well in managing the high Covid-19 infections by keeping death rates relatively low. Covid-19 has not been an easy period and it might be easy to forget the tough times of Covid-19 as we return to normalcy. May we all continue to stay vigilant and mask up where necessary, so that we would not have to revert to the days of lockdowns and compulsory mask-wearing in Singapore!
