Covid 19 -

[russellw]

Worth noting that Australia has already recorded 15 new cases thus far today.

We took a detailed look at Brazil a couple of weeks ago as their response to the pandemic has largely been one of business as usual so we compared how they were tracking compared to the neighbouring countries of Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru all of whom had implemented lockdowns with varying degrees of success.

Since that time, Brazil has continued to record high daily new case numbers and the trend line has largely been a straight (and steep) upward line although Argentina has also climbed albeit less steeply and even Colombia and Peru have been trending slightly upward with only Bolivia showing a downward trend.





Peru actually makes an interesting comparison as they were amongst the first of the South American countries to go into lockdown (16th March) and while their new case curve hasn't climbed at anything like the rate of Brazil, it also hasn't really headed downward at all and has been growing slowly but steadily. The Government is blaming the behaviour of the people in some regions who have been ignoring the lockdowns and the data would seem to support that theory.

The raw numbers don't tell the real story as there is a big disparity in the population bases of the two countries with Brazil having almost 6.5x the population of Peru so the chart below looks at the case trends per 100k of population.



It is obvious from that data that while Peru hasn't grown at quite the rate of Brazil, they are actually identifying more cases per 100k of population than Brazil. This may well be because they have tested considerably more people than Brazil. Indeed, Peru has tested more than 2,200 people per 100k while Brazil has only tested 345 per 100k so the real case numbers are probably a bit of a mystery.

The graph below might be a better overall view with the cases per 100k of population in Peru being more than twice that of Brazil.



The downside (of course) to having low case numbers is that case mortality rates tend to look high and Brazil is at 6.465% compared to Peru with 2.894% and Venezuela with 1.134%. Note that Venezuela has tested the most in the region with over 2,400 tests per 100k.



The final graph plots the deaths per 100k of population and Brazil and Peru are about level but also way ahead of the neighbouring countries.