Canada vs. US: COVID-19 Performance
Throughout the course of the spread of COVID-19 Canada has produced lower statistics for the number of cases and deaths than the US. The goal of this blog is to investigate the potential differences that have led to Canada controlling the pandemic better than its close neighbor based on the metric of “new daily cases”. I was interested to explore this topic because the two countries share many defining characteristics, yet performed quite differently when faced with this global pandemic.
To start I wanted to look at how “p” (the probability of transmission) and “k” (the number of people met by a person) differ between the two countries. When multiplied these two variables produce “Ro”, which is the basic reproductive number and translates to the expected number of new cases generated by each case. This introductory branching model could help to illuminate how Canada and the US are structurally set up to handle pandemics differently before and after public health officials take any actions.
An article from CTV News, “One analyst’s opinion: Why Canada flattened the curve — and the U.S. didn’t,” sums up a few theories for the differences we’ve seen. One theory is that Canadians are generally more compliant, while Americans are have “their attachment to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'” Canadian public health officials did seem to enforce social distancing measures earlier than the US, but the effects of these measures may have been fortified by Canadians’ inclination to rule follow. I think this is a particularly interesting phenomenon when you correlate which countries/states are enacting certain social distancing measures with their citizens’ likeliness to listen. Perhaps the less compliant citizens are a part of states with later-deployed or weaker COVID-19 strategies. If we ignore the timeliness of state-issued orders and focus on the effect it has on citizen behavior, I would still argue that Canadians have an easier control over changing “p” and “k” as citizens are more likely to listen AND have a stronger financial safety net.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/one-analyst-s-opinion-why-canada-flattened-the-curve-and-the-u-s-didn-t-1.5100895