Exploring Epidemiological Behavior of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak in Bangladesh

Globally, there is an obvious concern about the fact that the evolving 2019-nCoV coronavirus is a worldwide public health threat. The appearance of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in China at the end of 2019 triggered a major global epidemic, which is now a major community health issue. As of August 13, 2020, according to the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR), Bangladesh has reported 269,095 confirmed cases between 8 March and 13 August 2020, with > 1.30% of mortality rate and > 57% of recovery rate. COVID-19 outbreak is evolving so rapidly in Bangladesh; therefore, the availability of epidemiological data and its sensible analysis are essential to direct strategies for situational awareness and intervention. This article presents an exploratory data analysis approach to collect and analyze COVID-19 data on epidemiological outbreaks based on the first publicly available COVID-19 Daily Dataset of Bangladesh. Various publicly open data sources on the outbreak of COVID-19 provided by the IEDCR, World Health Organization (WHO), Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MHFW) of Bangladesh have been used in this research. Visual exploratory data analysis (V-EDA) techniques have been followed in this research to understand the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 outbreak in different districts of Bangladesh between 8 March 2020 and 13 August 2020 and these findings were compared with those of other countries. In all, this is extremely important to promptly spread information to understand the risks of this pandemic and begin containment activities in the country.