India marks one COVID-19 death every 5 minutes

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Content

People across India scrambled for life-saving oxygen supplies on Friday and patients lay dying outside hospitals as the capital recorded the equivalent of one death from COVID-19 every five minutes.

For the second day running, the country’s overnight infection total was higher than ever recorded anywhere in the world since the pandemic began last year, at 332,730.

India’s second wave has hit with such ferocity that hospitals are running out of oxygen, beds, and anti-viral drugs. Many patients have been turned away because there was no space for them, doctors in Delhi said.

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Mass cremations have been taking place as the crematoriums have run out of space. Ambulance sirens sounded throughout the day in the deserted streets of the capital, one of India’s worst-hit cities, where a lockdown is in place to try and stem the transmission of the virus. source

Dataset

The dataset consists of the tweets made with the #IndiaWantsOxygen hashtag covering the tweets from the past week. The dataset totally consists of 25,440 tweets and will be updated on a daily basis.

The description of the features is given below | No |Columns | Descriptions | | -- | -- | -- | | 1 | user_name | The name of the user, as they’ve defined it. | | 2 | user_location | The user-defined location for this account’s profile. | | 3 | user_description | The user-defined UTF-8 string describing their account. | | 4 | user_created | Time and date, when the account was created. | | 5 | user_followers | The number of followers an account currently has. | | 6 | user_friends | The number of friends an account currently has. | | 7 | user_favourites | The number of favorites an account currently has | | 8 | user_verified | When true, indicates that the user has a verified account | | 9 | date | UTC time and date when the Tweet was created | | 10 | text | The actual UTF-8 text of the Tweet | | 11 | hashtags | All the other hashtags posted in the tweet along with #IndiaWantsOxygen | | 12 | source | Utility used to post the Tweet, Tweets from the Twitter website have a source value - web | | 13 | is_retweet | Indicates whether this Tweet has been Retweeted by the authenticating user. |

Acknowledgements

https://globalnews.ca/news/7785122/india-covid-19-hospitals-record/ Image courtesy: BBC and Reuters

Inspiration

The past few days have been really depressing after seeing these incidents. These tweets are the voice of the indians requesting help and people all over the globe asking their own countries to support India by providing oxygen tanks.

And I strongly believe that this is not just some data, but the pure emotions of people and their call for help. And I hope we as data scientists could contribute on this front by providing valuable information and insights.

Context

This dataset is created as a part of covid-19 global forecasting challenge. It contains parameters for the SIR model for different locations worldwide. But the main value of the dataset is estimated transmission period (average period between single infected individual infects next susceptible in pure susceptible population) per week per location.

The model is defined as ODE system as follows: https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/29728a7d4bebe8197dca7d873d81b9dce954522e" alt="SIR ODE equations">

In order to reflect the transmission rate changes caused by spread constraining measures (social distancing, etc.) the Beta parameter is modelled separately as spline model (spline node estimate for every week). See paramsWeekly.csv which holds the Beta parameter values for every week as well as estimated R0 values (derived from Beta and Gamma paramters) for every week.

The models are fitted on John Hopkins University data (time series) using several runs of Nelder-Mead simplex optimization method (best run is taken) starting at different initial locations and RMSE as a loss.

What parameters are fitted (estimated) per country/province: * the day when the infection emerged in the country * the initial infected count on the first day of the infection * beta (separate value for every week) - an average number of contacts (sufficient to spread the disease) per day each infected individual has * gamma - fixed fraction of the infected group that will recover during any given day * R0 - Equals beta/gamma

How to read the figures. * points are real observed data provided by Johns Hopkins University * curves are model prediction

• blue is susceptible population - people that are not yet infected but can get the infection
• red is infected population
• green is removed population (recovered or dead). people that are not susceptible any more as they came through the infection.

Content

The dataset contains 3 data portions:

1. Fitted SIR model parameters for different locations worldwide. a. Params.csv - parameters (and derived values) constant over time b. ParamsWeekly.csv - parameters (and derived values) that are estimated for every week separatly
2. Figures directory that visually show how the fitted parameters match the data points.
3. Predictions directory with CSV files with prediction for one year in the future for each individual location.

Warning

Always do visual check of the model fit (Figures directory) for quality control before start to use the corresponding parameter values in your analysis, as the dataset is obtained by automatic fitting procedure without manual quality control.

Acknowledgements

Thanks a lot Kaggle for organizing data sharing and challenges that make the world better.

Also many thanks to John Hopkins University for their hard work of gathering COVID-19 statistics worldwide.

Inspiration

You can try to find correlation between model parameters (e.g. gamma - patient recovery rate) and other properties of the modelled locations worldwide (e.g. weather, population density, level of medical care, etc.)