The Curve? Week 3 Update

With plenty of spare time on my hands, I have continued to compare Canada and Italy's COVID-19 data. This week I isolated Quebec's numbers and aligned their provincial data with the Italian 'curve'. The results were notable in two ways (see Figure 4 in the .PDF):

(1) Quebec's 'curve' aligned with Italy's 6 days earlier than the rest of Canada. It was pointed out to me by Lisa Lamka (and undoubtedly well understood already by my friends in Quebec) that this may have been due to the fact that Quebec's March Break was March 2-9. The higher case rate and earlier development in Quebec may be explained in part by the introduction of broad measures to control the spread of the virus after March Break travelers had returned and spent a week in school and at work.

(2) The new case rate per 100K in Quebec has been relatively close to Italy's new case rate. The same number for the rest of Canada began to diverge from Italy's data more than two weeks ago (see Figure 2 in the .PDF).

As before, the full report contains a graph showing Italy's cases per 100K population adapted to Canada's population to provide a simple comparison of the two countries over time. At the national level this trend is promising but the provincial numbers show the reality that the impact of the virus is extremely variable across the country.

With this apparent imbalance between provinces in the pressure on the healthcare systems and suffering of the populations, it is encouraging to see Alberta sharing resources to support Ontario, Quebec and BC. Interestingly, BC has a lower total case rate per 100K than Alberta itself (see Table 1 in the .PDF).

Note - Figure 3: Ontario Forecast (Italian Baseline). My earlier "Italian Adjusted Forecast" was constructed by simply subtracting the Mean Percentage Error of the Ontario case rate from the case rate of the Italy Basic Forecast. This approach has become . . . unreliable. The Mean Percentage Error for future dates now exceeds the projected rate of growth in some cases. To adjust for this complication, Figure 3 now factors the projected Italian data using the Mean Percentage Error as a fraction of the Italy new case rate.