10-months study regarding the COVID-19 spreading in Romanian counties

Abstract

The paper analyzes the evolution of COVID-19 cases in Romanian counties over a period of 10 months, to highlight possible similarities that may contribute to a better understanding of the spreading pattern. The study uses the numbers of active cases for each county in Romania, as well as Bucharest and the whole country, reported daily by the Romanian Ministry of Health (https://datelazi.ro) between April 2nd, 2020 and January 25th, 2021. We compared the disease's evolution in Suceava county (the first outbreak of spread) with other counties in Romania in order to highlight the gaps between them. We calculated the cross-correlations between counties, interpreted as time series. The recorded lags varied between 1 - 15 days, the most counties having a lag of 6-7 days compared with Suceava. Therefore, on long term there are no important discrepancies between the regions in Romania regarding the evolution of the disease, which shows that the intervention efforts of the medical staff were uniform in efficiency. The existence of a lag of only one day between Suceava and the whole country shows that on long term, even in this county the situation is not very discrepant, belonging to the general evolution. © 2021 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and IOS Press.