layman's attempt at trying to find Covid patterns

[Debamitro Chakraborti]

Hi,

I am a total layman when it comes to data science, so please advise me accordingly.

I was thinking if there is any pattern observed in Covid-19 cases in India. Can we understand why some regions are more affected and some are less affected?

I took an excel sheet and took the total number of cases in each state from https://www.mygov.in/covid-19 and the population of each state from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_union_territories_of_India_by_population . If I look at the number of cases per 1000 population it seems Delhi, Goa and Ladakh are on top and Bihar is at the bottom. Does this have any meaning? Does this indicate that cases have been more at locations where there is high international traffic?

Regards,

Debamitro

[Rohan Jhunja]

Having tried something similar I have found that population is often concentrated in cities/towns. Comparing states is not as insightful. Would be good to find a frequently updated dataset at this level, otherwise the only source seems to be individual municipal websites.
Staying in Goa, the reason for the high cases was initially attributed to the high number of tourists. Traffic in/out of regions could be an indicator. While the state has gone into lockdown, cases continue to rise rapidly. An IG post pointed out that Goa and Mumbai have the same number of new cases per day, while Mumbai has 13 times the population of Goa. People's behaviour seems to have some bearing on the number of cases. 

Then of course, the question of testing and reporting comes in.. Is there a way to determine the data reliability of each state?

Thanks for the question, 

Rohan.