I have always wanted to visit Switzerland, the swiss alps, the chocolate and cheese, the diverse culture, you name it, it’s always on my travel bucket list. I was actually planning to spend my summer holiday there in January 2020 , however, covid made it impossible for me to travel there. I wanted to choose Switzerland for this brief analysis (it is one of my uni assignments), I guess it will give me insights into the current COVID situation in Switzerland so that I could re-plan my trip to there when the borders open, plus I have a dog named Byron, he is a Bernese Mountain Dog, one of the swiss breeds!
So let us begin exploring the COVID data for Switzerland!
Data Description 📄
The five separate data sets used in the post were sourced from opendata.swiss, it is the Swiss public administration’s central portal for open government data (opendata.swiss, 2021). Four of the five data sets were joined together to create a new data set called s_cov, it contains 10 variables and 550 observations which include covid data for Switzerland from 24/02/2020 to 26/08/2021. Data dictionary and number and percentage of missings in each variable are as follows:
Data Dictionary
Variable
Class
Description
geoRegion
character
Country geocode
geoRegionName
character
Country name
date
date
Date
daily_confirmed
numeric
Daily confirmed Covid-19 cases
daily_test
numeric
Daily total test numbers
daily_pos_test
numeric
Daily total positive test
daily_neg_test
numeric
Daily total negative test
daily_total_deaths
numeric
Daily total deaths
daily_hosp
numeric
Daily total hospitalisation numbers
The other data set is all about the vaccination entries for each countries. By filtering this data set to just contain Switzerland, a new data set produced and it’s called s_vac, it has 4 variables and 496 observations which have data from 22/12/2020 to 20/08/2021. Tables of Data dictionary and missing values in each variables are as follows:
Data Dictionary
Variable
Class
Description
date
date
Date
geoRegion
character
Country geocode
vaccines
date
Type of vaccines administered: Moderna or Pfizer
daily_confirmed
numeric
Daily confirmed Covid-19 cases
Data Exploration 🔍
Total Number of COVID-19 Confirmed Cases in Europe 📊
As Figure 1 shown below, Russia, France and the United Kingdom have the most confirmed cases, followed by Italy, Germany and Spain. Switzerland are amongst the countries that have less confirmed cases, however, population needs to be taken into account when making comparisons with the total number of confirmed cases for each countries.
Figure 1: Total Confirmed Covid-19 Cases in Europe by 26/08/2021
COVID-19 Figures in Switzerland (Feburary 2020 - August 2021) 📈
Figure 2 (produced by DT) presents the total number of confirmed cases, test numbers, deaths and hospitalisation by month for both 2020 and 2021. The coloured bars in each column show the distribution of the data, the bulk of the data for confirmed cases, deaths and hospitalisation all lie between October 2020 to January 2021 whereas testing numbers had been remaining high since October 2020, this indicates that the Swiss government has been doing a good job on encouraging people to get tested. There has been a spike in the confirmed cases and hospitalisation numbers since late June, this is largely due to the highly infectious Delta variant that affecting the unvaccinated people (SWI swissinfo.ch, 2021). Although the data is showing an concerning trend, there is a positive sign that the number of deaths have been maintaining low so far and hopefully the Swiss government could have the infectious rate under contol in the near future.
Figure 2: COVID-19 Figures from Feb 2020 to August 2021
Vaccination Status in Switzerland 💉
The Moderna vaccine that being supplied to Europe is in fact manufactured in Switzerland by a Swiss firm called Lonza (House of Switzerland, 2021) and it has become the most popular vaccine in Switzerland. This could be one of the reasons that causes the average number of Moderna administered (26,555.32) was almost twice the amount of Pfizer (13,68.90) and the highest daily number of Moderna administered (88,814) was more than double the amount of Pfizer (37,954), see Table 1. It it suspected that people may prefer vaccine that is manufactured in their home country rather than overseas. Another reason could be the approval for Moderna by the Swiss government in January this year after the approval for Pfizer in late 2020 and the Swiss drug regulator states that it showed 95% efficay in the trials (Miller, 2021), this could also potentially be the reason why a surge in demand for the Moderna. Furthermore, Table 1 also demonstrates that both vaccine have a moderate positive skewness while the data for Moderna vaccine is more spread out.
Table 1:
Summary Statistics of Vaccines Administered in 2021
Summary Statistics
Moderna
Pfizer
min
0.00
0.00
max
88814.00
37954.00
mean
26555.32
13368.90
sd
24915.84
10068.56
skewness
0.97
0.88
There were total of 9508327 vaccines administered, being 6320167 doeses of Moderna and 3188160 doeses of Pfizer so far and that is roughly 55.24% of the population (8,606,033) in Switzerland. Table 2 (produced by formattable) shows the total amount of vaccines administered in each month from December 2020 to August 2021, the deeper the colour the highest the number. There was a big increase in the number of Moderna doses since January and it had been increasing quite dramatically whereas the increase in Pfizer was not as significant as Moderna. However, the numbers for both vaccines continued to drop since June while there were enough doeses to be administered, the number of people willing to be vacicines began to drop. The Swiss government had come up with solutions to boost the vaccination rate, mobile vaccination centres, free cakes as incentive and as of October 1, the COVID test for all unvaccinated persons will no longer be free of charge (Schengenvisainfo, 2021) and hopefully this policy will trigger an increase in the vaccination rate.
Table 2: Vaccines Administered in Switzerland in 2021
Year
Month
Moderna
Pfizer
2020
12
2
6361
2021
1
111290
189406
2021
2
266659
234223
2021
3
401970
345698
2021
4
645327
626439
2021
5
1384756
789801
2021
6
1991410
541365
2021
7
1179295
282191
2021
8
339458
172676
To sum up, the Swiss government has done a good job on controlling the spread of the virus by maintaining a low death rate, promotion on the vaccination campaign as well as tightening up the restrictions etc. A survey shows that almost 73% of people who took part in a survey said they thought Switzerland was doing better than other European countries in dealing with the pandemic (SWI swissinfo.ch, 2021). Let’s hope this pandemic will end soon and there will be a light at the end of the tunnel!
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Corrections
If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.
Citation
For attribution, please cite this work as
Yang (2021, Aug. 29). Y | MY: Covid in Switzerland 🇨🇭. Retrieved from https://etc5523-2021.github.io/blog-myan0065/posts/2021-08-29-covid-in-switzerland/
BibTeX citation
@misc{yang2021covid,
author = {Yang, Jaffie},
title = {Y | MY: Covid in Switzerland 🇨🇭},
url = {https://etc5523-2021.github.io/blog-myan0065/posts/2021-08-29-covid-in-switzerland/},
year = {2021}
}
