The second wave of the pandemic: Moscow and the north-western regions suffered less than others

Network analyst Boris Ovchinnikov, who uses the number of inquiries about it in search networks to monitor the intensity of coronavirus infection and whose conclusions about the beginning of the second wave of Novye Izvestia were already published about a month ago, summarized the latest data on his blog:

Regions of Russia in one picture

I have been collecting the geography of queries with the word "smell" (for the last 30 days) on an almost daily basis for about a week and a half, and this allows me to compare the situation at "now" (for the last few days) with what it was about a week ago. The graph shows estimates * for 4 days (October 20-23) ** the frequency of queries with the word "smell" (the share of hits in search results for queries with the word "smell" in %% of all hits of search results for any queries in the given region) and changes in this frequency compared to the same period a week ago (October 13-16). The area of each circle is proportional to the number of requests for "smell" in the region for the last 30 days. Sorry for the clutter and hard-to-read of the schedule - making it more visual with improvised means and in a reasonable time is impossible

Each macro-region is shown here with its own color (the division into macro-regions in some places deviates from the canonical ***). The most problematic color is dark red, Siberia: with the exception of Tyva (and the Omsk region I joined to the Urals), all other regions of Siberia, according to the current situation, are divided into two groups: (a) a very high frequency of requests for smell (about 0.05% from all queries to Yandex), but already slowing growth - Altai Territory and Kemerovo Region; (b) a high or very high frequency of requests (from 0.03% in the Zabaikalsk and Krasnoyarsk regions merging on the graph with each other to almost 0.05%) - and at the same time a rapid growth (by 0.010-0.018% per week). The statistics for Novosibirsk and even more so Irkutsk regions are especially alarming - they moved from the middle of the chart to the upper right corner in a week, and most likely in a few days they will be the leaders in terms of the frequency of requests with the word "smell".

The second most problematic color is light green, this is the southern part of the Central District. Here, everywhere the share of requests for smell exceeded 0.03% of all, but at the same time very different dynamics: from a noticeable reduction in Lipetsk and Belgorod regions (which until recently were among the all-Russian leaders) to rapid growth in Kursk and Tambov regions. The largest region in this group - the Voronezh region - on the graph, unfortunately, almost completely merges with the neighboring Volgograd region, but it is he who shows the most alarming statistics: in terms of the frequency of requests, it is at the level of the Lipetsk and Belgorod regions, but unlike them, Voronezh has not yet emerged decline.

The situation in the Urals is less homogeneous - on the one hand, Chelyabinsk and Kurgan regions are in the top 5 regions in terms of the frequency of requests for smell (and this frequency continues to grow, especially in the Kurgan region). In the Omsk region, the frequency of requests is slightly lower (but still almost 2.5 times higher than the July peak) - but it is also growing faster. In the rest of the regions of this group, the situation is better - in the Perm Territory there seems to be a decrease, in the Tyumen and Sverdlovsk regions the growth is small (and in the Sverdlovsk region the frequency of requests about smell is almost 2 times lower than among its neighbors in the Chelyabinsk and Kurgan regions), in the oil and gas in the districts, growth is more significant - but it is starting from a relatively low level.

The Volga region and the South are completely heterogeneous. At their geographic junction, there is a group of regions with very similar search statistics - these are Penza, Samara, Saratov, Orenburg, Volgograd regions (and the nearby Voronezh region, which belongs to the Central Federal District). There is a high frequency of requests for smell everywhere (over 0.04%), but the growth, if there is, is small - it varies from zero in the Orenburg region to 0.005% per week in the Saratov region. Among other regions of the Volga region, Mordovia, on the one hand, and Udmurtia, on the other, stand out sharply: in the first, a sharp increase began, in the second, a record rate of decrease in the frequency of requests among all regions of Russia, which, incidentally, is not surprising: in Udmurtia, growth began not in September, as in the rest of the country. , and back in August, and it is logical that the peak was reached and passed earlier. The most prosperous regions in the Volga region are Chuvashia (on the graph just above Moscow) and Mari-El (to the right of Moscow), and in the remaining regions the situation varies from a high (about 0.035%), but not growing frequency of requests in the Kirov and Ulyanovsk regions to frequencies are only slightly higher than 0.025% with moderate growth in Tatarstan and the Nizhny Novgorod region. As for the south, the Kuban and Stavropol regions are similar to Moscow in terms of the frequency of requests and the lack of growth, in the Astrakhan region the frequency is higher, but there is also no noticeable increase, and in the Rostov region the frequency is much higher, but there is a noticeable decrease.

Most of the Far East (the two largest regions in terms of population - Primorye and Khabarovsk Territory, as well as Sakhalin and Amur Region) are still characterized by a relatively low (far from Siberian records) frequency of search queries about smell - but this frequency is growing quite rapidly. The Jewish Autonomous Region (already a very high level of frequency of requests), Magadan Oblast and Chukotka (there are many requests, but the frequency is growing slowly), Kamchatka (low frequency and very small growth) and Yakutia (low frequency and a noticeable decrease) are out of the general trend for the macroregion.

Against the general background, Central Russia (in the narrow sense - Moscow with the surrounding regions) looks relatively well - if we compare macroregions as a whole, the situation is better only in the North-West and in the republics of the North Caucasus. However, this is only in comparison with other macro-regions. Even the level of Moscow (in my estimation, 0.017% for October 20-23) is significantly higher than the previous record from the beginning of May (0.013%). Apart from Moscow, only the Moscow Region and the Tver Region are kept below the frequency of 0.025%. Moreover, in all other regions of the Center, with the exception of the Yaroslavl and Ryazan regions, the frequency increased by at least 0.004% over the week. The worst situation is apparently in the Kostroma and Ivanovo regions.

The statistics for the Northwest is even better. Only in two regions - Komi and Nenets Autonomous Okrug (for which there is a large error in estimates due to the small number of users) - the frequency of queries with the word "smell" exceeds 0.02% (we can say that according to search statistics, these two regions are no longer like Northwest, and the rest of the oil and gas north). Unlike Moscow, St. Petersburg has not yet surpassed its June record for the frequency of requests. Fly in the ointment - if we consider not the difference in the frequency of requests according to the latest data and a week earlier, but the ratio, then the Pskov and Kaliningrad regions turn out to be leaders in terms of growth rate - over the week the frequency of requests about smell in these 2 regions increased by 1.7-1.8 times (yes, from a very low level - but the trend is alarming). For comparison, even in the Irkutsk Region, Khakassia, Tomsk Region, Krasnoyarsk and Trans-Baikal Territories, the growth is only about 1.6 times.

Well, the review is completed by the North Caucasus. As in the southernmost "Russian" regions (Kuban and Stavropol), the situation here is relatively favorable - with the exception of North Ossetia, where the frequency of inquiries has grown by 1.5 times per week). In Kalmykia, a significant decrease after the August-October rise, in Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia, the frequency is slightly higher than in Moscow, and a weekly growth of 0.003%, Ingushetia and especially Chechnya and Dagestan are all record holders with the lowest frequency of requests for smell ( it should be borne in mind that these same regions have the highest cumulative excess mortality for the entire pandemic - they paid too high a price for the spring surge to be more careful than other regions now). Moreover, please note that the current search statistics for Chechnya and Dagestan, that is, for two regions that now look like bright positive exceptions against the background of other regions, coincides with the figures that we had for Russia as a whole in mid-August. This is about the scale of change.

***

* Why estimates and not exact numbers? Because the estimate for the last few days can be derived from the dynamics of 30-day amounts only if there is data on the frequency of requests 30 days ago (that is, for those days that have now "dropped out" from the calculation of 30-day amounts), and such historical I don't have the data and it's difficult to get it out of Yandex services (it requires a lot of manual work and calculations), so instead I had to build a special algorithm for estimating the frequency of requests in the region a month ago - since its accuracy is not very important, almost everywhere requests are 30 days back was many times less than now.

** Why are the assessments in 4 days? As I wrote above, I have collected data slices for a 30-day number of requests in 12 days. I have no data on whether requests for smell have any dependence on the day of the week - most likely not, but it's better to play it safe. Therefore, it is better to calculate the dynamics by comparing with the same days of the previous week - and with the available data, the maximum can be "cut" two ranges (with a distance between them of one week) 4 days each

*** The main driver of the deviation from the "canon" is a purely aesthetic desire for all the identified macroregions to be approximately equal in terms of the number of regions. I also took into account the geographical proximity, typological similarity of regions and the similarity of the trajectory of the development of the epidemiological situation

P.S. I posted the initial data here (forGraph sheet)"