Graphs day 61, pandemic day 67, day 138 since the first cases were diagnosed.

Total cases diagnosed worldwide: 4,597,894

Current worldwide deaths: 311,588

Cases and deaths worldwide

I’ve mentioned several times now that the number of new cases and deaths worldwide have increased at a steady rate since at least early April. It’s amazing how long this trend has held. It’s been long enough that I’m comfortable using that rate to make specific predictions for when we will hit upcoming milestones, at least for the next couple weeks. It’s very hard to predict more than 2-3 weeks ahead, but I think in the short term the progression of the pandemic is easy to predict.

Here’s the graph I’ve been showing for a while now. What’s new today is that I’ve divided both cases and deaths into two phases: an early exponential-ish growth phase and linear-ish growth phase. The black lines are the best-fit lines to the linear growth. It’s not a perfect fit – it never is – but it’s remarkable how close the fit is to the data.

Since April 1st, the number of cases has grown steadily at about 80,000 new cases per day. The number of deaths has increased steadily at about 6,000 per day. That means I’m predicting these as the dates when we will hit the next few milestones:

Five million cases: Saturday, May 23rd

Four hundred thousand deaths: Sunday, June 1st

Six million cases: Thursday, June 4th

Seven million cases: Wednesday, June 17th

Five hundred thousand deaths: Thursday, June 18th

I hope I’m wrong and there are no more cases or deaths. I’ll keep track of actual cases to see how these predictions work out.

Cases and deaths by country

One change to today’s maps: I decided to rescale the case graphs. Qatar is so far ahead of the rest of the world that they would be off the scale regardless, so I might as well rescale the graphs to make the differences between other countries clearer. The scale on the map of deaths by country has not changed.

After talking with some cousins online, I got curious about the history of cases in Serbia. The news actually looks pretty good there, see below.

Cases by country

The map of cases and deaths per capita in Europe and South America:

And the plot of the rate of cases and deaths per capita in these countries, now including Serbia:

The curve seems to have flattened almost completely in Serbia, even more so than it has in Italy. That is great news. Meanwhile the curve continues to grow steadily in the United States, and to accelerate in Brazil and Saudi Arabia.

Deaths by country

The map of deaths by country in Europe and South America has the same color scale as before:

and the plot of deaths per country, now including Serbia:

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 (version 3.2). I’d love to see what you can build with it!

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