Does the density of cases impacts on the virus transmission?

The 500,000 people who balik kampung at the start of the MCO started their journey on 7 May.  If they are all coming back to the Klang Valley, it will boost the population by about 7%.  This is not good news if you agree that the density of cases has an impact on the spread of the virus as per the Australian analogy below.  

I saw recent news citing Australia as one of the success stories in the fight against Covid.  19.  When I started to look at the country, I saw that it had about the same number of cases and deaths as Malaysia.  However, its case count for the past few days has been much lower than that for Malaysia. A comparison as at 7 May showed the following

Country	No of cases	No of deaths	7 days moving average no of cases
Australia	6,894	97	18
Malaysia	6,428	107	69

But Australia’s trajectory had a much higher but sharper peak despite Malaysia having more stringent measures e.g. EMCO and all industries shutting down.  I understand that construction and many manufacturing continued to operate in Australia. 

Comparative Chart

Both countries started to restrict public activities about the same time yet Malaysia appeared to take a longer time to bring the number of cases to single digits.

Maybe some of our 69ers in Australia can help but the main differences between these 2 countries that I could see were

• Malaysia seems to have more clusters c/w community spread
• More Australians downloaded the contact tracing app
• Maybe Malaysia have more foreign and/or illegal workers
• While there is a slight difference in the population (25m for Australia c/w 32m for Malaysia) Australia is 23 times bigger than Malaysia. 

I think the main reason for the different virus trajectory is the virus density i.e. 0.9 case per 1,000 sq km for Australia c/w 19.4 for Malaysia i.e. Australia with a lower population density reduces the chances of contact.  For a highly contagious virus, it matters a lot.  

I may be facetious, but taking this virus density to the logical conclusion, it means that 

• All those who had balik kampung should continue to stay there to help reduce the population density of Klang Valley. Haha
• There should not be any hurry to get all the college and university students to come back since a lot of the colleges/uni are in urban areas

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PS: This blog is for me to better understand COVID 19 as this will impact my investments. If you are also into equities, follow me at i4value.asia

Disclaimer:  I am not an epidemiologist, healthcare worker, pharmacist or staff in the Ministry of Health, but rather is someone with a strong interest in numerical analysis.  The content is an attempt to understand what is happening in the battle against Covid 19 from a data-based perspective. The opinions expressed here are based on information extracted from readily available public sources but I do not warrant its completeness or accuracy and should not be relied on as such.