Weekend vs Weekday of COVID-19 Case
COVID-19 case drops on Saturday and Sunday, do you know why? It might be due to lower test. But, does it relate to number of deaths as well?
Context
Analyzing a data does not only answer a question. Many times it even generates more questions. Data only tells us what is happening. But, it does not tell us why. Exploring into the unknown of a dataset is always thrilling which generally is called data analytics.
Data about COVID-19, provided in the GitHub, tells us more than about number of new cases and deaths. If we explore more, we can find more insights, for instance what the daily trend it has.
From top 10 highest case countries, United States is on the first position with most cases per 18 January 2022.
Analyzing variables
From the dataset we can see that weekdays have more cases reported than weekend in around the world.
The highest case in weekdays trend is aligned with United States and most other top 10 countries except India. In addition, the similar pattern also emerge from four major region, Asia, North America, South America, and Europe. Interestingly, if we zoom in to Monday, France has lowest case while Spain has highest case compared to other day within the country.
Drawing conclusions
From all mentioned and displayed pattern above — weekend has lower case than weekdays — , it leads us to look at the daily test trend. It apparently tells same thing: weekend number of test is lower than the weekdays. Until here, shall we assume that daily new case follows daily new test?
Dr. Pauline Terebuh, an epidemiologist has hypothesis: “It’s much more common that people are going to be tested during the week because they may be required to have testing, for example, if they’re going to work and there is some testing protocol in place or testing is offered at doctors’ offices and so forth.”
However, one big question still lingers if we look further to number of deaths. It would not make any sense to make a causation of number of deaths is due to number of test. I still don’t know any hypothesis to answer: why do we have more deaths on weekend compared to weekdays?
For the interactive visualization in Tableau, please click the link below.
