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.