Day eight. Once again presenting the graphs of COVID-19 cases and deaths per million people for various countries that have been discussed in the “news” in the last few weeks. Remember that these are per-capita graphs, which make the data easier to interpret in some ways and harder in some other ways.

Some good news and some bad news in today’s charts. First, the charts:

Cases per million people

Deaths per million people

The bad news comes from the Deaths per million people graph. Italy is now literally off the chart. For the past few days, I have been plotting the vertical axis (deaths per million people) between 0 and 75, but the cumulative death rate from COVID-19 in Italy today has hit 113 per million (6,820 deaths so far in a country of 60 million people). I reset the scale to run from 0 to 120 cumulative deaths per million people. I fear I will likely have to reset the scale a few more times before the dying levels off.

The maybe good news might come from the graph of cases per million people. It looks like the slope of the line for Italy is starting to turn over. While the total number of cases in Italy is still increasing because new cases are still being reported, fewer new cases are being reported today than a few days ago. Some experts (which I am not) have interpreted this as showing that social distancing measures in Italy have begun to work. We’ll see if this trend continues.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. 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. Some of you have sent me graphs and ideas (hi David! hi Aimee! Hi Ed!), and I’ll respond to you once I’m more caught up on my Actual Job.

Update tomorrow, and every day until this f@cking terrible pandemic is over.