Graphs day 16, pandemic day 22, day 93 since Wuhan.
COVID-19 has now reached 203 separate countries and territories, now including the Caribbean island of St. Barthélemy. More than 900,000 people have been diagnosed, and more than 46,000 have died.
In fact, since the dataset I am using is updated only once a day, at about 5 AM ET, we have already passed the 1,000,000 case threshold. It will show up in my data tomorrow, rather than Saturday as I had predicted. I’m not sure whether this means that the pace of the disease’s spread is increasing, or simply that my very very simple models are not good enough to make solid predictions. I’m not too worried about this – I hope that my contribution to the discussion can be to show you that you have the tools and knowledge at your disposal to see the data for yourself.
Cases in individual countries
Today’s graph of per capita cases and deaths by country continues yesterday’s, with the same countries represented by the same color scheme and labels.
It appears that the rate of new cases has indeed decreased for Belgium, although not to the extent it had last week in Italy. The rate is also slowing in Germany and France, while it keeps on speeding ahead in Spain and the United States. I’m a bit mystified by the difference between Belgium and Spain – the two countries enacted similar quarantine policies at similar times, so why are the patterns so different? Any ideas?
Case fatality rates continue to vary between countries, primarily due to differences in population structure. Because COVID-19 is so much more fatal to people above age 60 than it is to younger people, countries with larger percentages of older people have higher death rates.
I am playing with some new data sources and some new visualization methods, so stay tuned for updates soon!
Usual disclaimers: I’m not an expert, I’m just a guy on the Internet who likes to make graphs of things. I hope I’ve shown you some ways you can look into COVID-19 data for yourself. 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” link). I have updated my Excel template to add the line labels automatically (although they still take some manual formatting to look right).
Update tomorrow, and every day until this pandemic is over.
This is really appreciated. It’s sad how rare per capita information related to the pandemic is online especially given the lack of confidence in absolute case counts and nearly all other absolute data. Death counts per capita seems the only useful information at this point. Thank you!