Graphs day 104, pandemic day 111, day 181 since the first cases were diagnosed. Today we’re hitting all. themilestones aat once.

Total cases of COVID-19 diagnosed worldwide: 10,112,754

Total deaths: 501,562

The daily up-and-down of daily cases has taken us down, but the overall trend of cases keeps going up up up:

Last Wednesday, I made some updated predictions of when we would reach some new tragic milestones. I had predicted 500,000 deaths would arrive tomorrow; in fact, the milestone arrived today. I predicted that we would hit 600,000 deaths on Wednesday, July 22nd; we’ll see if we hit that milestone early as well.

I’m keeping an eye on the countries, mostly in Asia and western Europe, where COVID-19 seems to be under control. They’re all steady so far. If cases creep up anywhere, like they did in Serbia a couple weeks ago, I’ll let you know.

Countries where cases seem to be moving in the right direction:

Maybe they’re not all headed in the right direction, unfortunately. Cases in Peru today are way up, but that might be just a daily variation or a catch up of a few days’ worth of cases. There’s not enough to say that Peru is getting worse again, but I’ll keep a close eye on them. And meanwhile, the steady decrease in cases in Qatar has slowed down to flat, but fortunately the situation in Qatar is not getting worse either.

Countries where the epidemic is getting worse:

Note that, depressingly, the case rate in the U.S. is significantly higher than it was at its previous peak (93 cases reported per million people on April 8th compared to 119 cases reported per million people today).

But the biggest number today is this: 10,000,000. In less than six months, the total number of cases in the world has gone from zero to ten million. Think about that. It takes nine months to have a single human baby, increasing the human population by one. In far less time, the virus has gone from infecting zero (that we knew of at the time) to more than ten million (at least), and each of those people have millions of copies of the virus inside them. Because the virus reproduces so much faster than we do, and so the virus will always have the advantage in this game.

We need all our players on the field.

Want to try out some of these graphs for yourself? You can get the data that I used to make the country graphs from the European Centers for Disease Control’s Coronavirus Source Data; choose “all four metrics.” If it would help you to start from my Excel templates, please use them! The county data and analysis is in my national-level data template (now version 4.2).

Update tomorrow, and every day after that until this pandemic comes to an end or I lose my mind.