Obviously we had the great news earlier this week that New Zealand is now just one cabinet decision away from allowing their Live Event industry to get back to what we all love: full stadia, great events, and happy official VIP Hospitality clients!
There’s considerable hope that of the major markets for official VIP Hospitality Australia might be the next to emerge from the full Live Event lockdown.
But in the great wash of reporting about the Live Event lockdown, including every ‘maybe this will happen’, ‘that might happen’, and ‘is set to happen’, it can be a challenge to work out exactly what is the status in each country with regard the coronavirus. This is particularly significant if your responsibility includes any sort of regional or international over-view.
So for your ease of understanding we are sharing with you these very informative graphs presented by the Visual Capitalist who do a wonderful job of making the complex seem simple, or at least presenting the complex in a way that is easy to visualise.
The charts below capture how 41 major economies are reopening, by plotting two metrics for each country: the mobility rate and the coronavirus recovery rate:
- Mobility Index
This refers to the change in activity around workplaces, subtracting activity around residences, measured as a percentage deviation from the baseline.
- Coronavirus Recovery Rate
The number of recovered cases in a country is measured as the percentage of total cases.
Data for the first measure comes from Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports. This relies on aggregated, anonymous location history data from individuals. NB Because of the PR China government’s ban on Google, China does not show up in the graphic.
Coronavirus recovery rates rely on values from CoronaTracker. This uses aggregated information from multiple global and governmental databases such as WHO and CDC.
[The DAIMANI Journal considers that the UK’s ‘recovery rates’ are too low to make sense. When all of the other countries in the top 13 have recovery rates in the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands, it can’t be possible for the UK’s figure to be only 135. Even if you don’t like the Tories and Brexit!]
As Visual Capitalist explains their analysis of the scatterplot visualization, allows countries to be grouped into four distinct quadrants:
1. High Mobility, High Recovery
Thanks to high recovery rates the countries in this quadrant are lifting restrictions, and people are steadily returning to work.
New Zealand has earned praise for its early and effective pandemic response, allowing it to curtail the total number of cases. This has resulted in the highest recovery rate of all the surveyed countries. After almost 50 days of lockdown, the government is considering opening up Live Event venues to full crowds, subject to tracking protocols being in place.
2. High Mobility, Low Recovery
Despite low coronavirus-related recoveries, the mobility rates in these countries remain higher than average. This speaks to one of two things: countries have loosened lockdown measures, or did not have strict measures in place to begin with.
Brazil is the case study to consider here. After deferring lockdown decisions to state and local levels, the country is now averaging the highest number of daily cases out of any country.
3. Low Mobility, High Recovery
Countries in this quadrant are playing it safe, and holding off on reopening their economies until the population has fully recovered.
Italy, once the epicentre in Europe is understandably wary of cases rising back up to critical levels. As a result, it has opted to keep its activity to a minimum to try and boost the 65% recovery rate, even as it slowly emerges from over two-and-a-half months of lockdown.
4. Low Mobility, Low Recovery
Last but not least, people in these countries are cautiously remaining indoors as their governments continue to work on crisis response.
With a low 0.05% recovery rate [NB TDJ’s serious reservations about the ‘recovery rates’ reported for the UK], the United Kingdom has no immediate plans to reopen. A two-week lag time in reporting discharged patients from NHS services may also be contributing to this low number. Although new cases are levelling off, the country has the highest coronavirus-caused death toll across Europe.
The U.S. also sits in this quadrant with over 1.7 million cases and counting. Recently, some states have opted to ease restrictions on social and business activity, which could potentially result in case numbers climbing back up.
Over in Sweden, a controversial herd immunity strategy meant that the country continued business as usual amid the rest of Europe’s heightened regulations. Sweden’s COVID-19 recovery rate sits at only 13.9%, and the country’s -93% mobility rate implies that people have been taking their own precautions.
In related news, yesterday CNBC interviewed Lakshman Achuthan from the Economic Cycle Research Institute to get his impression of whether the recent Wall Street stock market rallies would reflect the 2009-2010 strong recovery or the more tentative post ‘dot.com’ recovery that stuttered its way through 2001-2003.
