Graphs day 32, pandemic day 38, day 109 since the first cases were diagnosed. Nearly 2.2 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and more than 153,000 have died.

Remember how I was going to show you a map of cases by country today? It was going to be a beautiful map. Like best map ever. But my awesome map got Franced.

I’d show it to you, but it would have a giant hole where France should be. The problem is the “overseas departments” of France. France is divided into 101 “départments,” roughly equivalent to states in the U.S. or provinces in other countries. Ninety-four départments are in the European continent, two are in Corsica, and the other five are scattered around the world: French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, and Réunion. They are part of France just as surely as Hawaii is part of the United States. And the problem is that my geography data considers these five regions, and the European part of France, are considered six separate geographic entities – while the COVID-19 case and death datasets report cases from all areas together as France.

I’ll get this sorted out soon, but in the meantime it’s an excuse for some France jokes. Comment your favorites.

The map may be delayed, but the usual graphs are right on time. Here’s the graph of cases per million people for our usual eight countries: Spain, Belgium, Italy, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Japan. Sigh, I had to rescale the graph yet again because the case rate in Spain has passed 4,000 per million. In other words, more than 0.4 percent of the entire population of Spain has at some point been diagnosed with COVID-19. Reminder: COVID-19 did not exist four months ago.

Here is the graph of cases per million by “days elapsed in the local epidemic” – the number of days after the case rate reached 1 in 1,000,000. This map makes it easier to see that, while the growth rate in Italy and Spain has fallen to sub-linear, growth continues at a linear rate in the UK and the US – and it appears to be continuing at an exponential rate in Russia. Meanwhile, Japan had the virus beaten but released its precautionary measures too early. Fortunately, those measures are back in place so we should soon see the rate fall again.

Belgium continues to lead the world in deaths per million people:

…and unfortunately it’s even clearer when comparing Belgium to Spain and Italy in terms of days elapsed:\

The usual graphs will be back tomorrow – and hopefully I’ll add maps of cases and deaths by country. France willing.

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’s the latest version with all the graphs including Russia and Japan.

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