While Twitter has grown popular among political leaders as a means of computer-mediated mass media communication alternative, the COVID-19 pandemic required new strategies for socio-political communication to handle such a crisis. Using the case of India, which was one of the worst-hit countries and is also the world’s largest democracy, this research explicates how political leaders responded to the COVID-19 crisis on Twitter during the first wave as it was the first time such a crisis occurred. Theoretical frameworks of discursive leadership and situational crisis communication theory have been used to analyze interactions based on the usage patterns, the content of communication, the extent of usage in relation to the severity of the crisis, and the possible role of leaders’ position along with the status of their political party. The sample consisted of tweets posted by six prominent political leaders in India across the four consecutive lockdown periods from 25th March to 31st May 2020. A total of 4,158 tweets were scrapped and after filtering for retweets, the final dataset consisted of 2,809 original tweets. Exploratory data analysis, sentiment analysis, and content analysis were conducted. It was found that the tweets had an overall positive sentiment, an important crisis management strategy. Four main themes emerged: crisis management information, strengthening followers’ resilience and trust, reputation management, and leaders’ proactiveness. By focusing on such discursive aspects of crisis management, the study comprehensively highlights how political interactions on twitter integrated with politics and governance to handle COVID-19 in India. The study has implications for the fields of digital media interaction, political communication, public relations, and crisis leadership.

Changelog:

Update September 20, 2021: Data and overview updated to reflect data used in the September 15 story Over Half of States Have Rolled Back Public Health Powers in Pandemic. It includes 303 state or local public health leaders who resigned, retired or were fired between April 1, 2020 and Sept. 12, 2021. Previous versions of this dataset reflected data used in the Dec. 2020 and April 2021 stories.

Overview

Across the U.S., state and local public health officials have found themselves at the center of a political storm as they combat the worst pandemic in a century. Amid a fractured federal response, the usually invisible army of workers charged with preventing the spread of infectious disease has become a public punching bag.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, at least 303 state or local public health leaders in 41 states have resigned, retired or been fired since April 1, 2020, according to an ongoing investigation by The Associated Press and KHN.

According to experts, that is the largest exodus of public health leaders in American history.

Many left due to political blowback or pandemic pressure, as they became the target of groups that have coalesced around a common goal — fighting and even threatening officials over mask orders and well-established public health activities like quarantines and contact tracing. Some left to take higher profile positions, or due to health concerns. Others were fired for poor performance. Dozens retired. An untold number of lower level staffers have also left.

The result is a further erosion of the nation’s already fragile public health infrastructure, which KHN and the AP documented beginning in 2020 in the Underfunded and Under Threat project.

Findings

The AP and KHN found that:

• One in five Americans live in a community that has lost its local public health department leader during the pandemic
• Top public health officials in 28 states have left state-level departments ## Using this data To filter for data specific to your state, use this query

To get total numbers of exits by state, broken down by state and local departments, use this query

Methodology

KHN and AP counted how many state and local public health leaders have left their jobs between April 1, 2020 and Sept. 12, 2021.

The government tasks public health workers with improving the health of the general population, through their work to encourage healthy living and prevent infectious disease. To that end, public health officials do everything from inspecting water and food safety to testing the nation’s babies for metabolic diseases and contact tracing cases of syphilis.

Many parts of the country have a health officer and a health director/administrator by statute. The analysis counted both of those positions if they existed. For state-level departments, the count tracks people in the top and second-highest-ranking job.

The analysis includes exits of top department officials regardless of reason, because no matter the reason, each left a vacancy at the top of a health agency during the pandemic. Reasons for departures include political pressure, health concerns and poor performance. Others left to take higher profile positions or to retire. Some departments had multiple top officials exit over the course of the pandemic; each is included in the analysis.

Reporters compiled the exit list by reaching out to public health associations and experts in every state and interviewing hundreds of public health employees. They also received information from the National Association of City and County Health Officials, and combed news reports and records.

Public health departments can be found at multiple levels of government. Each state has a department that handles these tasks, but most states also have local departments that either operate under local or state control. The population served by each local health department is calculated using the U.S. Census Bureau 2019 Population Estimates based on each department’s jurisdiction.

KHN and the AP have worked since the spring on a series of stories documenting the funding, staffing and problems around public health. A previous data distribution detailed a decade's worth of cuts to state and local spending and staffing on public health. That data can be found here.

Attribution

Findings and the data should be cited as: "According to a KHN and Associated Press report."

Is Data Missing?

If you know of a public health official in your state or area who has left that position between April 1, 2020 and Sept. 12, 2021 and isn't currently in our dataset, please contact authors Anna Maria Barry-Jester annab@kff.org, Hannah Recht hrecht@kff.org, Michelle Smith mrsmith@ap.org and Lauren Weber laurenw@kff.org.

Text corpus and Big Five leadership traits as demonstrated in Brown, Horvath, and Stevens (2021) "Moonshots or a Cautious Take-Off? How the Big Five Leadership Traits Predict Covid Policy Response" (working paper).

According to a global survey conducted in 2020, ** percent of respondents from the Sub-Saharan Africa region trusted the religious leaders had made a lot of COVID-related decisions based on scientific advice, the highest share across all regions globally. This statistic presents the distribution of public opinion on whether religious leaders based COVID-related decisions on scientific advice worldwide in 2020, by region.

Context

• Does a central/fedral government have the power/authority to completely isolate a province/state?
• How quickly can a government react to the situation?
• Is the government able to effectively allocate and move the resources to where they are needed the most in a timely manner?
• What is the risk appetite of the leader?
• What is the risk appetite of the goverment?

The spread of COVID-19 is more than just a technical and scientific question. How and how well can a country contain the spread of the virus also depends on its leader and regime characteristics.

Content

This dataset contains 5 leader characteristics to profile the leader of a country. - whether the leader is elected - tenure - age - gender - military experience

This dataset also contains 1 regime characteristic that outlines the political structure. Notably, - presidential democracy: Democracy in which the executive is distinct from the legislative branch and considerable decision-making authority is granted to the executive. - parliamentary Democracy: Democracy in which legislatures are more powerful and executives are less autonomous. - single-party systems: Power is held by the head of a party. Executive power is effectively checked by the party or ruling committee.

Additionally, this dataset contains other politial factors that may affect how the leader and government react to the situation, including anticipated election in the near term and whether there were previous civil conflicts.

Acknowledgements

The source of the dataset is updated by Bell, Curtis at OEFRESESARCH.ORG (citation below) and is altered for the COVID-19 forcasting challenge.

Bell, Curtis. 2016. The Rulers, Elections, and Irregular Governance Dataset (REIGN). Broomfield, CO: OEF Research. Available at oefresearch.org

Detailed variable descriptions can be found at https://oefresearch.org/sites/default/files/REIGN_descriptions.pdf

Infectious disease experts have predicted a pandemic, saying it was not a question of if but when. Drawing on experiences with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), avian influenza (H5N1), and novel influenza A (H1N1), the World Health Organization (WHO) and other health authorities, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), urged nations and local governments to prepare pandemic response plans. Many ministries of health and subnational departments of health around the world have activated those plans in response to coronavirus and are sharing data as required by the updated International Health Regulations.Esri's work with health organizations and government leaders has proven location intelligence from geographic information system (GIS) technology and data to be critical for the following:Assessing risk and evaluating threatsMonitoring and tracking outbreaksMaintaining situational awarenessEnsuring resource allocationNotifying agencies and communitiesThe current coronavirus disease pandemic presents an opportunity to build on the experience and readiness of Esri's existing global user community in health and human services. Through real-time maps, apps, and dashboards, GIS will also facilitate a seamless flow of relevant data as a component of the response from local to global levels. A compelling case exists for building on top of the public health GIS foundation that is already in place both in the United States and around the world.After reading this paper, leadership and senior staff should understand the following:The necessity to apply location intelligence to public health processes in coronavirus responseHow GIS can support immediate and long-term actionWhat resources Esri provides its customers

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a globally spread—but differently timed—implementation of school closures and other disruptive containment measures as governments worldwide intervened to curb transmission of disease. This study argues that the timing of such disruptive interventions reflects how governments balance the principles of precaution and proportionality in their pandemic decision-making. A theory is proposed of how their trade-off is impacted by two interacting institutional factors: electoral democratic institutions, which incentivize political leaders to increasingly favor precaution, and high state administrative capacity, which instead makes a proportional strategy involving later containment measures more administratively and politically feasible. Global patterns consistent with this theory are documented among 170 countries in early 2020, using Cox models of school closures and other non-pharmaceutical interventions. Corroborating the theorized mechanisms, additional results indicate that electoral competition prompts democratic leaders’ faster response, and that this mechanism is weaker where professional state agencies have more influence over policy-making.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global societal, economic, and social upheaval unseen in living memory. There have been substantial cross-national differences in the kinds of policies implemented by political decision-makers to prevent the spread of the virus, to test the population, and to manage infected patients. Among other factors, these policies vary with politicians’ sex: early findings indicate that, on average, female leaders seem more focused on minimizing direct human suffering caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while male leaders implement riskier short-term decisions, possibly aiming to minimize economic disruptions. These sex differences are consistent with broader findings in psychology, reflecting women’s stronger empathy, higher pathogen disgust, health concern, care-taking orientation, and dislike for the suffering of other people—as well as men’s higher risk-taking, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, and focus on financial indicators of success and status. This review article contextualizes sex differences in pandemic leadership in an evolutionary framework. Evolution by natural selection is the only known process in nature that organizes organisms into higher degrees of functional order, or counteracts the unavoidable disorder that would otherwise ensue, and is therefore essential for explaining the origins of human sex differences. Differential sexual selection and parental investment between males and females, together with the sexual differentiation of the mammalian brain, drive sex differences in cognition and behavioral dispositions, underlying men’s and women’s leadership styles and decision-making during a global pandemic. According to the sexually dimorphic leadership specialization hypothesis, general psychobehavioral sex differences have been exapted during human evolution to create sexually dimorphic leadership styles. They may be facultatively co-opted by societies and/or followers when facing different kinds of ecological and/or sociopolitical threats, such as disease outbreaks or intergroup aggression. Early evidence indicates that against the invisible viral foe that can bring nations to their knees, the strategic circumspection of empathic feminine health “worriers” may bring more effective and humanitarian outcomes than the devil-may-care incaution of masculine risk-taking “warriors”.

Context

This is a dataset of the most highly populated city (if applicable) in a form easy to join with the COVID19 Global Forecasting (Week 1) dataset. You can see how to use it in this kernel

Content

There are four columns. The first two correspond to the columns from the original COVID19 Global Forecasting (Week 1) dataset. The other two is the highest population density, at city level, for the given country/state. Note that some countries are very small and in those cases the population density reflects the entire country. Since the original dataset has a few cruise ships as well, I've added them there.

Acknowledgements

Thanks a lot to Kaggle for this competition that gave me the opportunity to look closely at some data and understand this problem better.

Inspiration

Summary: I believe that the square root of the population density should relate to the logistic growth factor of the SIR model. I think the SEIR model isn't applicable due to any intervention being too late for a fast-spreading virus like this, especially in places with dense populations.

After playing with the data provided in COVID19 Global Forecasting (Week 1) (and everything else online or media) a bit, one thing becomes clear. They have nothing to do with epidemiology. They reflect sociopolitical characteristics of a country/state and, more specifically, the reactivity and attitude towards testing.

The testing method used (PCR tests) means that what we measure could potentially be a proxy for the number of people infected during the last 3 weeks, i.e the growth (with lag). It's not how many people have been infected and recovered. Antibody or serology tests would measure that, and by using them, we could go back to normality faster... but those will arrive too late. Way earlier, China will have experimentally shown that it's safe to go back to normal as soon as your number of newly infected per day is close to zero.

https://www.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/kaggle-user-content/o/inbox%2F197482%2F429e0fdd7f1ce86eba882857ac7a735e%2Fcovid-summary.png?generation=1585072438685236&alt=media" alt="">

My view, as a person living in NYC, about this virus, is that by the time governments react to media pressure, to lockdown or even test, it's too late. In dense areas, everyone susceptible has already amble opportunities to be infected. Especially for a virus with 5-14 days lag between infections and symptoms, a period during which hosts spread it all over on subway, the conditions are hopeless. Active populations have already been exposed, mostly asymptomatic and recovered. Sensitive/older populations are more self-isolated/careful in affluent societies (maybe this isn't the case in North Italy). As the virus finishes exploring the active population, it starts penetrating the more isolated ones. At this point in time, the first fatalities happen. Then testing starts. Then the media and the lockdown. Lockdown seems overly effective because it coincides with the tail of the disease spread. It helps slow down the virus exploring the long-tail of sensitive population, and we should all contribute by doing it, but it doesn't cause the end of the disease. If it did, then as soon as people were back in the streets (see China), there would be repeated outbreaks.

Smart politicians will test a lot because it will make their condition look worse. It helps them demand more resources. At the same time, they will have a low rate of fatalities due to large denominator. They can take credit for managing well a disproportionally major crisis - in contrast to people who didn't test.

We were lucky this time. We, Westerners, have woken up to the potential of a pandemic. I'm sure we will give further resources for prevention. Additionally, we will be more open-minded, helping politicians to have more direct responses. We will also require them to be more responsible in their messages and reactions.

When city leaders in Tempe, Arizona took a more data-driven and transparent approach to management, the ethos spread across departments. As a wastewater testing partnership with Arizona State University (ASU) moved past the pilot stage, data showing levels of illegal drug use was made visible to the public to show the local impact of the opioid crisis. Now researchers have tuned this same wastewater testing system to detect bio markers in the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV2), displaying the level of COVID-19 genome copies per liter of wastewater in the city._Communities around the world are taking strides in mitigating the threat that COVID-19 (coronavirus) poses. Geography and location analysis have a crucial role in better understanding this evolving pandemic.When you need help quickly, Esri can provide data, software, configurable applications, and technical support for your emergency GIS operations. Use GIS to rapidly access and visualize mission-critical information. Get the information you need quickly, in a way that’s easy to understand, to make better decisions during a crisis.Esri’s Disaster Response Program (DRP) assists with disasters worldwide as part of our corporate citizenship. We support response and relief efforts with GIS technology and expertise.More information...

How did Brazil become a global epicenter of the outbreak? After seeming to ease, is the virus making a comeback?

A world leader in infections and deaths.

Latin America became an epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in May, driven by Brazil’s ballooning caseload. Ten months after its first known case, Brazil has had more than 7.9 million cases and over 200,000 deaths.

In early June, Brazil began averaging about 1,000 deaths per day from Covid-19, joining the United States — and later India — as the countries with the world’s largest death tolls.

This dataset contains information about COVID-19 in Brazil extracted on the date 16/06/2021. It is the most updated dataset available about Covid in Brazil

Features:

🔍 date: date that the data was collected. format YYYY-MM-DD.
🔍 state: Abbreviation for States. Example: SP
🔍 city: Name of the city (if the value is NaN, they are referring to the State, not the city)
🔍 place_type: Can be City or State
🔍 order_for_place: Number that identifies the registering order for this location. The line that refers to the first log is going to be shown as 1, and the following information will start the count as an index.
🔍 is_last: Show if the line was the last update from that place, can be True or False
🔍 city_ibge_code: IBGE Code from the location
🔍confirmed: Number of confirmed cases.
🔍deaths: Number of deaths.
🔍estimated_population: Estimated population for this city/state in 2020. Data from IBGE
🔍estimated_population_2019: Estimated population for this city/state in 2019. Data from IBGE.
🔍confirmed_per_100k_inhabitants: Number of confirmed cases per 100.000 habitants (based on estimated_population).
🔍death_rate: Death rate (deaths / confirmed cases).

Acknowledgements

This dataset was downloaded from the URL bello. Thanks, Brasil.IO! Their main goal is to make all Brazilian data available to the public DATASET URL: https://brasil.io/dataset/covid19/files/ Cities map file https://geoftp.ibge.gov.br/organizacao_do_territorio/malhas_territoriais/malhas_municipais/municipio_2020/Brasil/BR/

Similar Datasets

COVID-19 - https://www.kaggle.com/rafaelherrero/covid19-brazil-full-cases-17062021 COVID-19 - https://www.kaggle.com/imdevskp/corona-virus-report MERS - https://www.kaggle.com/imdevskp/mers-outbreak-dataset-20122019 Ebola Western Africa 2014 Outbreak - https://www.kaggle.com/imdevskp/ebola-outbreak-20142016-complete-dataset H1N1 | Swine Flu 2009 Pandemic Dataset - https://www.kaggle.com/imdevskp/h1n1-swine-flu-2009-pandemic-dataset SARS 2003 Pandemic - https://www.kaggle.com/imdevskp/sars-outbreak-2003-complete-dataset HIV AIDS - https://www.kaggle.com/imdevskp/hiv-aids-dataset

A survey conducted in April 2020, consulting more than 100 marketing leaders worldwide, found that planning and management tools can help decrease challenges faced due to coronavirus. The surveyed marketers stated that the challenge of realigning people resources to new initiatives was ** percent less likely to impact their business. The challenge of managing a remote team and shifted priority decreased equally by ***** percent thanks to using management tools. However, the challenge of realigning the budget to new initiatives only decreased by *** percent, even though it was seen as a significant challenge during the pandemic.

At the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a new effort is under way to assist states in creating or enhancing localized COVID-19 dashboards and maps for the public. This effort with states has an external focus, aiming to help the them deliver data to residents, civic leaders, and public health administrators. Armed with this information, states and localities will be better equipped to monitor the impacts and mitigate risks, and federal resources can go where they are needed most, because everyone will be working from the same data._Communities around the world are taking strides in mitigating the threat that COVID-19 (coronavirus) poses. Geography and location analysis have a crucial role in better understanding this evolving pandemic.When you need help quickly, Esri can provide data, software, configurable applications, and technical support for your emergency GIS operations. Use GIS to rapidly access and visualize mission-critical information. Get the information you need quickly, in a way that’s easy to understand, to make better decisions during a crisis.Esri’s Disaster Response Program (DRP) assists with disasters worldwide as part of our corporate citizenship. We support response and relief efforts with GIS technology and expertise.More information...

Seattle Focuses on Economic Recovery, Starting LocallyAmid what is foremost a public health and safety crisis, many government leaders are looking for ways to support economic resilience and avoid longer-term impacts of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.In Seattle, Washington, city officials took early steps to provide for their local economy by launching the #SupportSeattleSmallBiz campaign. The goal of this campaign is to keep businesses open and keep the workforce supporting them employed. Helping Seattle businesses survive the pandemic required a location-based solution—connecting citizens with local businesses that are open. _Communities around the world are taking strides in mitigating the threat that COVID-19 (coronavirus) poses. Geography and location analysis have a crucial role in better understanding this evolving pandemic.When you need help quickly, Esri can provide data, software, configurable applications, and technical support for your emergency GIS operations. Use GIS to rapidly access and visualize mission-critical information. Get the information you need quickly, in a way that’s easy to understand, to make better decisions during a crisis.Esri’s Disaster Response Program (DRP) assists with disasters worldwide as part of our corporate citizenship. We support response and relief efforts with GIS technology and expertise.More information...

The G7 is a forum designed for frank and open discussion between leaders, ministers and policy-makers. As a member of the G7, Canada plays a leading role on the international stage and is able to advance domestic and international priorities. The G7 provides global leadership and serves as a powerful catalyst on issues that are later taken up by other fora with broader global and regional membership. The G7 brings together the world’s advanced economies to influence global trends and tackle pervasive and crosscutting issues, as well as emergent global crises. The G7 has strengthened international economic and security policies, advanced discussion of global issues including climate change and gender equality, brought donors together and supported disarmament programs. Most recently, the G7 has worked to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and respond to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. At the G7, Canada has advanced its domestic and international priorities, including gender equality, peace and security, climate change and building a sustainable global economy. Transparent and inclusive engagement with Canadian and international stakeholders has helped Canada to deliver on priorities that are important to Canadians.

In the third quarter of 2025, the mobile app of popular video communication platform Zoom recorded approximately ***** million downloads in the Asia-Pacific region. Downloads in North and Latin America were over * million, a small increase compared to the previous quarter. Zoom grew in popularity in 2020 due to the global outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on in-real-life environments and offline activities. Between the first and the second quarter of 2020, downloads of the Zoom mobile app skyrocketed thanks to the widespread adoption of alternative communication media for work, schooling, and social activities, among others. After both Microsoft Teams and Zoom experienced a peak in usage in 2020, downloads of the communication apps slowly decreased over 2021 and 2022. Who leads the meetings’ market? According to a survey conducted in 2023, meetings took most of the time for professionals in the United States, as they spent over ** hours each week having work conversations with colleagues. In 2024, Zoom was the most used videoconferencing app, with a global market share of over ** percent. Microsoft Teams followed, holding a share of the market of approximately ** percent, while GoToMeeting had a market share of less than ** percent. Zooming in: company financials and operations Zoom Video Communication’s revenue has experienced a constant increase since 2019. The company generated a revenue of over *** billion U.S. dollars in their fiscal year of 2024, an increase of over ** times compared to 2019—the year in which Zoom entered the public market. During Zoom’s most recently reported quarterly results, the company generated around *** million U.S. dollars in income from operations globally. In terms of spending on managerial operations, Zoom spent around *** billion U.S. dollars on sales and marketing during 2024. Additionally, the spending on research and development amounts to over *** million U.S. dollars. In 2024, Zoom’s workforce was comprised of approximately ** percent men and ** percent women. Around 73 percent of leaders in the company were men, while women held ** percent of leadership positions.

From 15/08/2020, I am no longer updating these files. Instead, I am directly reading data files from the Covid-19 Repository at John Hopkins University.

Context

I have created these datasets specifically for my analysis notebooks:

https://www.kaggle.com/aiaiaidavid/how-spain-became-leader-in-covid-19-infections

And others I am working on.

Content

These datasets contain covid-19 confirmed, recovered and detah cases time series for the following 10 world countries:

Europe: Spain, Italy, France, Germany and UK
Rest of the world: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Iran and USA

Note the files for 27072020 had two countries (Iran and Australia) removed.

Full data is obtained from the COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University:

https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the community of AI Saturdays Spain, which introduced me into Jupyter Notebooks and Kaggle, which has open up a new world of opportunities for me.

IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic emerged in a context that lacked adequate prevention, preparedness, and response (PPR) activities, and global, regional, and national leadership. South American countries were among world’s hardest hit by the pandemic, accounting for 10.1% of total cases and 20.1% of global deaths.MethodsThis study explores how pandemic PPR were affected by political, socioeconomic, and health system contexts as well as how PPR may have shaped pandemic outcomes in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. We then identify lessons learned and advance an agenda for improving PPR capacity at regional and national levels. We do this through a mixed-methods sequential explanatory study in four South American countries based on structured interviews and focus groups with elite policy makers.ResultsThe results of our study demonstrate that structural and contextual barriers limited PPR activities at political, social, and economic levels in each country, as well as through the structure of the health care system. Respondents believe that top-level government officials had insufficient political will for prioritizing pandemic PPR and post-COVID-19 recovery programs within their countries’ health agendas.DiscussionWe recommend a regional COVID-19 task force, post-pandemic recovery, social and economic protection for vulnerable groups, improved primary health care and surveillance systems, risk communication strategies, and community engagement to place pandemic PPR on Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru and other South American countries’ national public health agendas.

The G7 is a forum designed for frank and open discussion between leaders, ministers and policy-makers. As a member of the G7, Canada plays a leading role on the international stage and is able to advance domestic and international priorities. The G7 provides global leadership and serves as a powerful catalyst on issues that are later taken up by other fora with broader global and regional membership. The G7 brings together the world’s advanced economies to influence global trends and tackle pervasive and crosscutting issues, as well as emergent global crises. The G7 has strengthened international economic and security policies, advanced discussion of global issues including climate change and gender equality, brought donors together and supported disarmament programs. Most recently, the G7 has worked to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and respond to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. At the G7, Canada has advanced its domestic and international priorities, including gender equality, peace and security, climate change and building a sustainable global economy. Transparent and inclusive engagement with Canadian and international stakeholders has helped Canada to deliver on priorities that are important to Canadians.

Method

The dataset contains several confirmed COVID-19 cases, number of deaths, and death rate in six regions. The objective of the study is to compare the number of confirmed cases in Africa to other regions.

Death rate = Total number of deaths from COVID-19 divided by the Total Number of infected patients.

The study provides evidence for the country-level in six regions by the World Health Organisation's classification.

Findings

Based on the descriptive data provided above, we conclude that the lack of tourism is one of the key reasons why COVID-19 reported cases are low in Africa compared to other regions. We also justified this claim by providing evidence from the economic freedom index, which indicates that the vast majority of African countries recorded a low index for a business environment. On the other hand, we conclude that the death rate is higher in the African region compared to other regions. This points to issues concerning health-care expenditure, low capacity for testing for COVID-19, and poor infrastructure in the region.

Apart from COVID-19, there are significant pre-existing diseases, namely; Malaria, Flu, HIV/AIDS, and Ebola in the continent. This study, therefore, invites the leaders to invest massively in the health-care system, infrastructure, and human capital in order to provide a sustainable environment for today and future generations. Lastly, policy uncertainty has been a major issue in determining a sustainable development goal on the continent. This uncertainty has differentiated Africa to other regions in terms of stepping up in the time of global crisis.