Day ten of me graphing data, day sixteen of the pandemic (as declared by the World Health Organization), day eighty-seven since the first cases were reported in Wuhan. Pause for a moment and think about how fast this thing has spread – as of today, more than 500,000 cases have been reported worldwide.

Cases per million people

Today the United States has passed China to become the country with the largest number of total reported cases (85,991 for the U.S. vs. 82,079 for China and 80,539 for Italy). That’s 261 cases per one million Americans, as shown in the per capita graph below – four times the case rate of China, but still one-fifth of the rate in Italy.

The rate at which new cases are being diagnosed continues to slow slightly in Italy, continues to increase at a frightening clip in Spain and Belgium, and sits somewhere in the middle in the U.S.

Some of the growth, particularly in the U.S., is likely due to more widespread testing rather than people being newly infected. That’s only mildly good news, though, because until testing rates get much higher, there are still lots of people transmitting COVID-19 who don’t know they are transmitting COVID-19.

Deaths per million people

Sigh, I rescaled the graph again, the total death rate in Italy is now 136 deaths per million Italians (the green line in the graph below).

Deaths per million people have also increased sharply in France (blue dashed line) and Belgium (solid black line).

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. I’m working on some new graphs for future updates, you should too!

The good news is that I had some company for today’s graphing – my cat Simon colonized my lap and refused to leave until I finished writing this post. Here’s the adorable selfie:

Update tomorrow, and every day until this pandemic is over – on both the data and the cat.