Day seven of me doing this. You all seem fairly comfortable with the graphs of cases and deaths per million people for various countries, so those are the graphs I’ll show today. But please remember that these are per capita, so low values here for the U.S. and China still represent a lot of cases and deaths.

I also realized that the per-capita graphs contain a bit of an optical illusion, making it look like the line for China is going down. That is of course impossible – these are cumulative total cases, so the numbers can only either stay the same or go up as new cases are reported. I’ll look at ways to make this clearer in tomorrow’s update.

Cases per million people

Reported rates of COVID-19 continue to grow at an alarming rate throughout Europe, and are approaching that growth rate in the U.S. as well. Case rates in Iran, the U.K., and Australia are growing more slowly.

I am wondering if, instead of total numbers of diagnosed cases, I should be graphing the number of new cases diagnosed each day. That would mean that people diagnosed in the past who have recovered would not be included on the graph, and it would also make it more directly comparable with the “flatten the curve” diagrams that many people are sharing.

Deaths per million people

Countries that have recently seen an increase in reported cases per million people are just now beginning to see an increase in reported deaths per million people. These numbers are likely to increase as more time passes.

For this plot, I’m pretty sure that cumulative deaths is the right thing to graph, because once someone becomes dead, they stay dead.

Remember the purpose of all of this – the data are out there, and you can understand it with the tools that you already have. You can find the data from the European Centers for Disease Control’s Coronavirus Source Data site (download the CSV file from the “Full dataset” lin), and you are welcome to use my Microsoft Excel template.

Update tomorrow, and every day until this pandemic is over.