Graphs day 135, pandemic day 142, day 212 since the first cases were diagnosed. It’s been a full week since my last update post; I’ve spent the whole week completely rewriting my spreadsheet.

There are enough cases in enough regions, and there have been for so long, that my spreadsheet became completely unworkable. Each calculation took more than a minute to complete. So I implemented two tricks: I switched rows and columns, and I replaced some complex formulas with their values. The result is that I am back here again giving you updates.

And what an update it is. Last time I posted, Earth had just passed 15 million total cases since the beginning of the pandemic. Today, we passed 17 million cases.

Total cases of COVID-19 diagnosed worldwide: 17,029,155

Total deaths: 667,011

It’s Independece Day in Vanuatu, but Vanuatu is one of the few countries left in the world that has zero cases of COVID-19. Let’s hope they stay that way.

Here is an update on our usual four categories. Sadly, Japan has joined Australia as a country where COVID-19 had been contained but is now getting worse. Spain, Belgium, and Peru may soon join them. And then there’s Florida.

Always Florida.

Regions where COVID-19 was quickly contained

Usual graphs and labels for all four categories today. Note that Japan is gone from the “quickly contained” category this week, and that I’m reporting cases in Hubei (the province whose capital is Wuhan) separately from those in the rest of China.

I continue to marvel at how well China controlled the spread of the pandemic outside Hubei. That is, of course, if you believe these case numbers. There are some reasons to believe that these numbers are correct, and some reasons not to believe this numbers are correct. All I can say is that I do the best job I can to clearly and objectively graph the numbers I get from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, and provide enough interpretation and guidance so you can understand what they mean.

But as I’ve said before: if you’re a COVID-19 denier, this doesn’t support your position, it supports the opposite of your position. Are you saying that China has reason to suppress their true number of cases but literally every other country has reason to exaggerate their true number of cases, because reasons?

Regions where COVID-19 is currently under control(-ish)

Tragically, cases in Spain continue to rise like Robbie Van Persie in the 2014 World Cup.

Regions moving in the right direction(-ish)

Sadly, there were more cases in Peru yesterday than in either Qatar or Chile. On the other hand, yesterday daily cases in Sweden dropped to their lowest level since late March. All along, Sweden has been betting that their less stringent approach to social distancing would produce better long-term results than other countries. And maybe they were right? But we still won’t know until we get longer-term death figures from many more countries.

Regions where the epidemic is getting worse

Reluctantly I had to rescale the main graph up to 300 cases per million people to accommodate Brazil and South Africa (although South Africa has since dropped below 200 daily cases per million again. Florida remains on the Qatar scale.

In the past week, cases in Florida have stabilized – although they are still not decreasing, they are at least not increasing. Provided of course you believe the numbers from Florida. As with China, there are reasons to believe that cases are being underreported.

It’s time for a new version of the spreadsheet, now up to version 7. In the sheets called Finder and Cumulative, formulas have been replaced by values for faster calculation. The formulas are available next to the value blocks, but you’ll have to copy and fill them yourself if you want to try changing anything.

Pandemic updates tomorrow and every day until the pandemic ends or I do.