Graphs day 44, pandemic day 50, day 121 since the first cases were diagnosed. On the last day of March, almost 800,000 people worldwide had been diagnosed with COVID-19, and nearly 40,000 had died. Today, those numbers are more than 3,000,000 and more than 220,000.Where will we be at the end of May?

Here are today’s updated maps from Europe. Obviously there are cases all over the world, but Europe produces the most interesting maps. Usual color scale, with some values labeled. Cases per million people by country:

and deaths per million people:

Today is an even-numbered day, so we get a even plot – countries are shown with equivalent starting points. Day zero is the day on which the case rate reached one in 1,000,000; the horizontal axis shows the number of days since then. The case rate and death rate in Iceland and Switzerland have leveled off, so I’m removing them from the plot for the moment. And once again, Spain will report its data mañana.

The highest rate of increase in cases continues to be in the U.S. and the U.K. The U.S. is now significantly ahead of where Italy was at this point in their local epidemic. France has almost completely leveled off as well, so I may remove them from the plot next.

In terms of deaths per million people:

…what happened today in the United Kingdom?!?!? More than 4,000 deaths reported just today. I suspect this is a reporting issue – a backlog of previous deaths were all reported on the same day. We’ll see how they look tomorrow.

As always, you can get the data yourself from the European Centers for Disease Control’s Coronavirus Source Data; choose “all four metrics.” Here is my Excel template (version 3).

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

Graphs day 43, pandemic day 49, day 120 since the first cases were diagnosed. The data I’m showing you here is actually yesterday’s data – my analysis has become detailed enough, for enough data, that it’s now extremely difficult to do all the data processing each day and also write about the results here. So at least for today, I’ll show you yesterday’s data. If I get more time tonight, I’ll update this post to use today’s data.

As of yesterday (Tuesday April 28th) at 6 AM GMT, nearly 3,000,000 people worldwide had been diagnosed with COVID-19. By now it’s certainly above this round, depressing number. More than 200,000 have died.

With my last few posts, I’ve started showing national-level case and death data on maps as well as graphs. I mentioned last time that most of the variation was taking place in Europe. So here is a more detailed map of cases per million people for countries in and near Europe. The color scale is at the bottom; countries with fewer cases per million are darker colors (purples and blues), while countries with more cases are lighter colors (greens and yellows). (For those keeping score at home, this is matplotlib’s “viridis” colormap.) Case rates for some countries are given as labels.

and the same for death rates in Europe (again per million people, color scale below):

I mentioned last time, and I will again, that two countries in particular stand out in the maps above. Iceland has a particularly high case rate (nearly 4,000 per million), and Sweden has an unusually high death rate for its number of cases (225 per million). So I have added those two countries to the list of countries I regularly monitor, while dropping Japan, where cases have fortunately leveled off again after a second wave.

Today is an odd-numbered day, so here are the plots of cases and deaths in each country by calendar date, from in real time, from February 18th to yesterday. First for cases:

It turns out Iceland is not as interesting as it first appeared. The reason it has such a high case rate is simply that testing has been far more thorough than in most other countries. The rate of cases has flattened out. I probably won’t show Iceland again, but it’s interesting to see the impact that early and thorough testing can have on a a country’s case trajectory.

And deaths:

The rate of new deaths in Belgium appears to have slowed down, although I’ve said that before. Let’s hope the slowdown is for real this time. And the flattening of the curve in Spain is not good news, it just means that Spain didn’t issue a report on April 28th. That’s weird, but hopefully they reported today.

UPDATE: Spain did not report today. They will release today’s data mañana. The joke writes itself.

If I can get today’s data processed today (along with everything else I’m doing), I’ll update it here. But it appears my cat URGENTLY NEEDS TO SIT ON MY LAP! so that is unlikely:

As always, you can get the data yourself from the European Centers for Disease Control’s Coronavirus Source Data; choose “all four metrics.”

Here is a new version of the Excel template (version 3) that includes Iceland and Sweden.

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

Graphs day 39, pandemic day 45, day 116 since the first cases were diagnosed. More than 2,700,000 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and nearly 200,000 have died, for a global case fatality rate of 7 percent.

I did some slight reformatting of the map of worldwide case rates per million people, and it’s a little bit easier to read today. The color scale is at the bottom; countries with fewer cases per million are darker colors (purples and blues), while countries with more cases are lighter colors (greens and yellows).

And I also finished the equivalent map of COVID-19 death rates per million people. The relative color scale is the same; the values the colors represent are shown in the colorbar at the bottom.

Most of the dynamic range is in Europe, so tomorrow’s versions of these maps will focus on Europe, assuming I can get the map projections right. Two countries stick out on the maps are Iceland – which has an unusually high case rate, although it’s likely just a statistical artifact of having such a small population – and Sweden, which has an unusually high death rate. I haven’t been tracking those two countries, but I’ll start tomorrow. It’s worth noting that I hadn’t picked out these countries as interesting before – and that shows the power of looking at data in multiple ways.

No Iceland or Sweden yet, so I’m still graphing the same ten countries as yesterday. I’m going to try something new starting today, because I feel like we are on the verge of getting overwhelmed with graphs. So I will no longer show the two versions of each graph every day – the version labeled in real time and the version labeled in days since the local epidemic began (defined as the time since the case rate in a country reached one in 1,000,000 people.

Both graphs are useful for different reasons. So I’ll show them on alternate days. On odd-numbered editions of the series, I’ll show the graphs labeled in calendar dates, so you can see how the pandemic has spread out in real time around the world. On even-numbered editions of the series, I’ll show the graphs labeled in days since the local epidemic began.

Today is day 39 of my data graphing, so here are the graphs labeled by calendar day, starting February 15th and continuing through today. Cases per million people in our usual ten countries:

As before, the width of each line indicates the relative case fatality rate in each country; the actual case fatality rate values are shown in parentheses after the name of the country. Italy will soon pass Switzerland in terms of cases per capita, and most likely the United States will eventually pass them both. Keep a close eye on Russia (gray line) over the next few days. It looks like the growth rate has moved into the linear growth phase in Russia, but the next 3-5 days will tell us for sure. In Russia, data fit you!

On this odd-numbered edition, here is the graph of deaths due to COVID-19 in those same ten countries since February 15th.

The death rate in Spain has slowed, but they are still slightly widening their lead over Italy. Belgium still leads all, but the rate appears to finally be slowing down.

Coming tomorrow: A closer look at the maps for Europe, and starting to track cases and deaths in Iceland and Sweden.

As always, you can get the data yourself from the European Centers for Disease Control’s Coronavirus Source Data; choose “all four metrics.” You are welcome to use my Excel template to make your own graphs (version 2.3). I’ll updoot the version number tomorrow when I release the data for Iceland and Sweden.

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

Graphs day 37, pandemic day 43, day 114 since the first cases were diagnosed. Remember that map I was promising? BOOM!

I don’t know what this map tells us, except that I should keep an eye on Iceland. It’s also hard to tell the difference between different countries with this colorbar – so many just look purple. I’ll try some other choices.

I’ll keep exploring and let you know what I find. I’ll also write a guide explaining how you can use the SciServer website to make a map like this yourself.

Meanwhile I’m still making the usual graphs and counts. Sadly, we’re up to nearly 2,600,000 cases and more than 180,000 deaths. But the good news, maybe, is that the graph of global cases is starting to flatten out. Compare the most recent point to the previous few points.

On the national level, the same patterns continue. Someone asked how China was looking, so I returned them to today’s graph. They’re the nearly flat pink line waaaaaay at the bottom.

I didn’t include China on the graph of progress of the epidemic because it throws off the scale for reading the rest of the countries. Here is that graph:

In terms of deaths per million people, the U.S. has now passed Switzerland:

a full week earlier in the course of its epidemic than Switzerland’s:

Coming tomorrow: more MAPS!

You can get the data yourself from the European Centers for Disease Control’s Coronavirus Source Data; choose “all four metrics.” You are welcome to use my Excel template to make your own graphs; here is an updated version (version 2.3).

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

Graphs day 36, pandemic day 42, day 113 since the first cases were diagnosed. I missed yesterday’s post, so this is data update XXXV and data update XXXVI. I’m recommitting to my goal of posting a data update each and every day. As of today, more than 2.5 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and nearly 175,000 have died.

The last few days I thought I had seen the global case count turn over to sublinear, but no, it keeps chugging away at a constant rate.

Here are the usual graphs, updated through today, April 22, 2020. Not too much. has changed since Monday, although it looks like the epidemic has begun to quiet down in France and Japan. But of course we won’t really know anything until at least one virus incubation period has passed. Keep an eye on France, Japan, Italy, and Switzerland’s curves over the coming two weeks.

For most of the last 36 days, the cases in the United States have tracked along with cases in Italy on a delay – made clear by our usual graph of cases by day after the case rate reached 1 in 1,000,000. Well, the U.S. is not tracking Italy anymore – the rate of growth looks more like Belgium’s.

Speaking of Belgium… sadly I had to rescale the graph of deaths per million to display Belgium’s 517 deaths per 1,000,000 people:

The graph also shows that the deaths per capita in the U.S. will almost certainly pass Switzerland tomorrow. As the following graph shows, that is in spite of the U.S. being a week earlier in its epidemic (day 45 since the rate reached 1 per million compared to day 52 in Switzerland).

When looking at number of deaths per million people, the United States is nearly caught up to Switzerland:

…and is ahead of where Switzerland was at this point in the epidemic:

I’m actually done with the maps of cases and deaths by country, but they won’t be useful until I also figure out how to make a color scale. That will probably be tomorrow, unless insomnia makes it tonight.

Thanks to everyone who has told me that they find these regular graphs useful. I haven’t been able to respond to you all individually, but I’ll take some time to talk with you online this weekend.

You can get the data yourself from the European Centers for Disease Control’s Coronavirus Source Data; choose “all four metrics.” You are welcome to use my Excel template to make your own graphs; here is an updated version (version 2.3).

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

Graphs day 34, pandemic day 40, day 111 since the first cases were diagnosed. I missed yesterday’s post, so this is data update XXXIII and data update XXXIV. More than 2.3 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and nearly 165,000 have died.

By popular request, Switzerland has returned to today’s graphs, in their traditional shade of… orange? I tried to make my colors roughly flag-based, but there are too many red and white flags.

Switzerland seems to offer some very encouraging news, as more than any other country on the graph its cases appear to be leveling off. France is leveling off as well, although the trouble with France is that its case fatality rate of 18 percent is the highest of any country on the graph. Linear growth continues in Belgium, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

The continuing linear growth of cases in the U.S. is especially clear when looking at the cases per capita since the “start of the local epidemic,” defined here as the number of days since the case rate reached 1 in 1,000,000. Compare the United States to Italy and the United Kingdom to France.

When looking at number of deaths per million people, the United States is nearly caught up to Switzerland:

…and is ahead of where Switzerland was at this point in the epidemic:

I’ve made some progress on the maps, but they’re not quite ready yet. France is fixed, but I can’t seem to find the data for the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, or Turkmenistan. Czech back here tomorrow!

You can get the data yourself from the European Centers for Disease Control’s Coronavirus Source Data; choose “all four metrics.” You are welcome to use my Excel template to make your own graphs; here is an updated version (version 2.3).

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