| The COVID-19 pandemic has been a shacking experience for the entire world. Retrospective analysis of the data gathered during the pandemic can be used for the preparation for future pandemics. It is now possible to ascertain if the pandemic response has been the same across the world. Detecting differences in responses along time can be useful for preparation for future pandemics by researching on the causes for different responses. In this direction, this paper contributes evidence that the pandemic response, as measured by the death time series of each country, was not the same everywhere. Clusters of countries with similar death time series can be detected, such that countries in different clusters have rather different patterns of deaths. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) allows the elastic matching of time series. The cost of DTW matching provides a measure of similarity between the time series. Applying Hierarchical Clustering it is possible to find these clusters. Our findings confirm previous findings, specifically the existence of a robust cluster of western Europe countries that is confirmed by rather diverse approaches. Furthermore, we examine in detail the different patterns of several representative countries relative to Spain. |
*** Title, author list and abstract as submitted during Camera-Ready version delivery. Small changes that may have occurred during processing by Springer may not appear in this window.