Financial information on super early release scheme is…

Financial information on super early release scheme is one of many ways 'big data' helps COVID planning

THE arrival of digital "big data" - making coherent patterns out of an otherwise mystifying jumble of numbers - makes COVID-19 surely the most studied medical emergency in history, and it's still less than a year old.

Incredibly detailed information is available online from almost every country. At a deeper level, researchers in almost any discipline you can think of are crunching the numbers in some way, whether it's genetic sequencing and vaccine research, or advertising experts helping governments design their public messaging.

The accompanying chart shows where we are now. Global infection rates appear to have plateaued since late July at about 250,000 new cases a day. The first plateau from early April to mid-May averaged about 80,000 cases daily. Domestically, case numbers are falling quickly and business leaders are again calling for border openings, their concerns heightened by a slew of red ink on half-yearly company results.

Even so, the pandemic has been a financial boost for some companies.

Emblematic here has been the share price of Apple, which has doubled its value to $US2 trillion ($2.8 trillion, or $2800 billion) since the last week of March, when stocks around the world plummeted as the Great Shutdown began.

Part of Apple's rise has been investors pushing up the value of supposedly "safe haven" stocks. Locally, shares in the JB Hi-Fi chain hit an all-time peak above $51 yesterday, $7 higher than their February price when COVID-19 concerns kicked in.

JB and other retailers received a noticeable boost from Canberra's "early access to superannuation" scheme, which allowed people to withdraw up to $20,000 in two $10,000 lots. The scheme was controversial from the start, and as we are reporting today, "big data" analysis of the financial transactions of about 250,000 people has helped build a detailed picture of where the money went, and a lot of it appears to have been discretionary rather than necessary.

That doesn't mean the policy was wrong. At some point, people have to be responsible for their own spending decisions.

We did see glimmers of hope this week, with encouraging results from early vaccine trials, as well as the visibly slowing new case numbers. But we are still at sea, and a long way from any sort of safe sandy shore on which to beach the boat of all of our coronavirus concerns.

The rate of new infections has noticeably slowed on a global basis, but we saw that before back in April and May before numbers took off with little warning. Last night, the Johns Hopkins dashboard was showing 22.6 million cases and more than 793,000 deaths.

ISSUE: 39,393.

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