Daily COVID-19 data update LXXXIV: Bad News Peru

Graphs day 84, pandemic day 89, day 160 since the first cases were diagnosed.

Today is the day that Earth passed seven million cases of COVID-19, eight days before my mid-May prediction said we would. The good news is that the number of deaths continues to run behind those predictions.

Total cases of COVID-19 diagnosed worldwide: 7,069,278

Total deaths: 405,587

I will continue to show cases using the new methods I explained yesterday: plotting the number of newly reported cases, resulting in a curve that goes up and down as the pandemic waxes and wanes. Here’s what that type of graph looks like for the entire world over the entire history of the pandemic:

Cases of COVID-19 reported per day from the beginning. The blue line shows the actual data; the red line shows the smoothed data, which shows overall trends without the daily variations. Click for a larger version.

As you can see from the graph, we are very much in the middle of this pandemic.

Cases per million people by country

Yesterday I divided countries into four categories:

  • Countries that quickly contained their COVID-19 epidemics, and never had a large number of cases per million people
  • Countries that had many cases, but have since gotten their epidemics under control and have few new cases
  • Countries where a significant number of cases are still being diagnosed, but fewer and fewer each day – these countries are headed in the right direction
  • Countries where the epidemic is still getting worse

I’ll focus primarily on the last two categories – improving and getting worse. And unfortunately, we’ve already had one country move into the “getting worse” column.

First, the countries where the epidemic seems to be getting better, or at least staying the same:

Countries where newly-reported cases per million people are steady or decreasing

Notice that Peru is gone from the graph – the situation in Peru is getting worse again. Belarus, the United States, and Russia all make me nervous, because it looks like the curves could start going up again at any moment.

And now the countries where the epidemic continues to get worse, now sadly including Peru:

Cases per million people reported yesterday in Brazil and Sweden were almost exactly the same, but Sweden’s rate is a little higher. Sweden is starting to look really bad.

and as a graph comparing case rates on an even scale from each country’s “day zero,” the date on which cases reached 1 in 1,000,000:

Deaths per million people by country

When it comes to death, the dead stay dead, so it makes sense to consider cumulative deaths, resulting in curves that steadily increase with time. Those curves, for the Big Ten countries:

Deaths per million people in various countries (click for a larger image)

Note the large spike in deaths per million in Chile, presumably due to reporting of deaths catching up with the actual data.

Want to try out some other ways for yourself? You can get the data that I used to make these graphs from the European Centers for Disease Control’s Coronavirus Source Data; choose “all four metrics.” You’re still welcome to use my Excel template – I added a section for making the deaths graph to what is now verison 4.1, so that is the only one you need.

Update tomorrow, and every day after that until this pandemic comes to an end.

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