The Clustering Structure of the COVID-19 Outbreak in Global Scale

Spreading of novel coronavirus disease started in China and moved to Korea and Japan, then several countries in Europe, and the last step to the countries in the North and South American continents. Since the virus spread worldwide, we simultaneously use all available daily confirmed cases, recovered cases, and death data to cluster countries in time and spatial dimensions after adjusting for population. For this aim, time-series clustering with the dynamic time warping method is implemented and relevant clusters are marked on the world maps for a better visual understanding in this paper. Grouping countries will give an idea of the spread of the virus, guide decision-makers to implement future prevention vaccination policies, and help them generate global solutions against new virus variants. One of the main results obtained from the cluster analysis is that the European, North and South American continents have homogeneous structures regarding the number of daily confirmed cases per million and relatively more heterogeneous regarding the daily number of recoveries per million such that the overwhelming majority of countries are in the very high cluster. The absence of countries from the low or middle clusters indicates that these continents have to fight the virus more fiercely. African and Asian continents are heterogeneous in all cases. Therefore, these continents should focus on country-specific protections to fight against the virus.