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.