Unless You’re the Mongols (Daily COVID-19 data update CXVII)

Graphs day 117, pandemic day 124, day 194 since the first cases were diagnosed. I haven’t forgotten about “what if Florida were a country?,” it’s just proven more difficult than it first appeared. But I think I got it now, and I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.

Total cases of COVID-19 diagnosed worldwide: 12,717,921

Total deaths: 565,139

Cases by country

Today is Independence Day in the African island nation of Sao Tome and Principe. Conversely, Mongolia has no Independence Day – they’re the country that you celebrate your independence from – but this week is Naadam, the biggest holiday in the country.

MONGOLTAGE! (thanks John Green)

So today we’ll include both those countries in the graphs. They have just 727 and 230 cases respectively. It’s good to be an island nation, and it’s good to have the lowest population density in the world.

Usual graph style, usual four categories of countries. (I should really make a page that explains the graphs for people starting the blog from this post.)

Countries where COVID-19 was quickly contained

Countries that quickly contained their COVID-19 epidemics (click for a larger version)

You read that right, there have been zero deaths from COVID-19 in Mongolia (gold line). Happy Naadam!

Countries where COVID-19 is now under control

Countries where COVID-19 is currently under control (click for a larger version)

Sao Tome and Principe (pink) looks worse than it is because there are only 200,000 people in the entire country, about the size of Tallahassee, Florida or Arlington, Virginia. But after a few spikes, COVID-19 appears to be fully under control for now, just as it is in the European countries shown on the same graph.

Usual caveat: under control, for now. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Countries that are headed in the right direction(-ish)

Great news – welcome back to the main graph, Qatar!

Countries where newly-reported cases per million people are steady or decreasing (click for a larger version)

There was an uptick of cases in Sweden yesterday. Are they going to fool me again? It’s only been two days of increase (from 43 cases per million people on Thursday to 57 cases per million people yesterday), so I’m still hopeful that cases there will start decreasing again soon.

Countries where the epidemic is getting worse

Countries where the epidemic is still getting worse (click for a larger version)

The good news is that cases in Serbia, India, and Australia seem to have stabilized for the moment – still new cases being diagnosed each day, but at a steady rate. The bad news is that South Africa has now taken over top spot on the chart, and they did it far more swiftly than previous leaders USA and Brazil.

This week in this blog

Heads up, I’m going camping from Tuesday to Friday, so tomorrow will be the last regular COVID-19 update until Saturday. But I’ll still have regular posts for you on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Tomorrow: what if Florida were a country? How f*cked would that country be?

Coming up later this week: a special guest post from everyone’s favorite special guest blogger, the Grass Mud Horse!

How to do it yourself

Want to try out some of these graphs for yourself? You can get the data that I used to make the country graphs from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) COVID-19 data site. Click on csse_covid_19_data, then on csse_covid_19_time_series, then download all the CSV files. Or clone the whole repository from GitHub.

You are welcome and encouraged to use my Excel templates. I’ve tinkered enough that I’m plus-plusing the version to 5.1. I have two separate templates: a global data template and a U.S. state data template.

Update tomorrow, then not again until Saturday, then again every damn day until this damn pandemic ends. Sigh.

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