Modeling Central Asia's Choices in Containing COVID-19: A Multivariate Study

Different countries have adopted different policies in their fight against the COVID-19 outbreak. In this work we aim to model these approaches with respect to the first wave of COVID-19 (from January to October 2020) in the five Central Asian republics (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). By means of a multivariate approach based on principal component analysis and cluster analysis, we derived three clusters. Each of these represents a different strategy adopted by a group of governments in a given period of the first wave: pre-pandemic, initial reaction, and emergency scenarios. The contribution of these results is two-fold: on the one hand they may help us to understand differences and similarities among Central Asian republics during the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak and guide future quantitative or qualitative studies; on the other hand, our findings suggest that, with the exception of Turkmenistan, the different countries adopted very similar strategies and that deaths, more than cases, pushed governments to impose restrictions.