On Wednesday, I wrote about one of the many fascinating conversations I have had as a result of my continuing series plotting the history of the COVID-19 pandemic in real time. I was talking with a friend (pictured to the right, although it’s totally not him) about one of the most persistent misconceptions that we encounter in discussing COVID-19: that somehow it’s not so bad, because people die all the time.

Three thousand Americans a year die by drowning, the logic goes, so should we close all the pools in the country to protect them?

Of course we don’t close all the pools in the country, because the magnitude of the problem makes a real difference. I looked at what the differential death rates between drowning and COVID-19 actually mean. But of course, even that isn’t the real reason that we protect ourselves from COVID-19. As I pointed out at the very end of Wednesday’s post:

Drowning isn’t contagious.

But what if it was?

Like in this sketch from the classic comedy series The State, which has nothing to do with the rest of the post but you should watch because it’s funny:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjOvmSY8tws&feature=youtu.be&t=885

But here’s what I really meant: what if being present when someone drowns increased your chance of drowning yourself? That would be a pretty cool horror movie plot, kind of like The Ring – but let’s run with it and see us where it takes us.

Everything else is the same, people continue to drown at a rate of about 11 a day, just like they have every other year. But this year, starting on March 1st, drowning magically became contagious. Whenever someone drowns, their drowning causes others to drown two weeks later. There is no way to predict exactly how many other people will drown, but on average it will be around 2 or 3 – let’s say 2.3.

As you’ll see once I get to the math, this small change makes a tremendous difference in how many people will die. You can probably see where this argument is going. We’ll keep talking about drowning here, and then we’ll pivot back to COVID-19 at the end. And it will be even worse than it looks.

How bad would it be?

Remember the rules we set out for this model: starting on March 1st, drowning magically became contagious. By that date, already 632 people have drowned. Another 11 people drown on March 1st.

Nothing appears different at that time, but the wheels are in motion – as a result of each of those drownings, an average of 2.3 more people will inevitably drown in two weeks. Every day until March 14th, it continues – 11 more people people drown each day, and each of them infects an average of 2.3 people.

Every day from March 15th to 28th, 35 people drown.

Every day from March 29th to April 11th, 90 people drown.

Every day from April 12th to April 25th, 219 people drown.

Every day from April 26th to May 9th, 514 people drown.

Every day from May 10th to today, 1,193 people drown.

Total amount of people who have drowned in this model: 28,290

Imagine this situation: in a normal year, 1,507 people would have drowned by this point. This year, 28,290 people have drowned. If this were the case, would you support temporarily closing pools to figure out why, even if it causes some economic turmoil?

It’s even worse than that.

See the graph below, an adaptation of the graph I showed on Monday. The blue line is drowning in a regular year. The green line is this year’s contagious drowning. The orange line is COVID-19.

In every other year in American history, zero people died of COVID-19. So far this year, 94,702 Americans have died of COVID-19. More deaths are coming.

Graphs day 65, pandemic day 71, day 142 since the first cases were diagnosed. Time for a more extensive update of the data.

Total cases of COVID-19 diagnosed worldwide: 4,960,975

Total deaths: 327,904

Last Sunday, I predicted that the number of cases of COVID-19 worldwide would reach five million this Saturday, May 23rd. Well, unfortunately, Worldometers says we’re there already. That doesn’t count as a successful prediction yet, though – I’m predicting based on my data, which is updated in the morning and thus lags behind the Worldometers data. But there’s no question that tomorrow, I’ll have to rescale the graph to above five million.

Here’s that graph. The black lines are still the best-fit lines to total cases and deaths from April 1st to today. They still fit well, but notice how the last six orange points are consistently above the line. That is the graphical representation of the fact that new cases are being diagnosed faster than my prediction suggested.

The next milestone is four hundred thousand deaths due to COVID-19. I had predicted that we would reach 400,000 on June 1st – but now it appears it could happen as soon as next Tuesday, May 26th. I don’t like being ahead of schedule.

Cases per million people by country

New to the maps this week, for both cases and deaths: I have encouraged people to compare the rates in Sweden to the rates in the countries around Sweden. I’ve made it easier to do that by adding data labels for Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Estonia.

and the graph of cases per million people in our usual countries:

The U.S. is getting perilously close to becoming the top country on the graph. And on the other end is India, just beginning to turn over – at the beginning of what could be a long, brutal stretch of sickness and death.

Deaths per million people by country

The comparison between Sweden and its neighbors is even clearer when you look at deaths per million people – 379 per million in Sweden compared to 43 per million in Norway.

and rounding out our usual graphs, the number of deaths over time in the same ten countries:

Don’t like what I graphed? Graph it yourself! You can get the data 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, and I’m happy to help you figure it out!

Coming tomorrow: my friend (the same one I talked about yesterday) asked this in a comment:

“What sets COVID apart from these other mass killers?”

– My awesome friend

I’m so glad he asked, because that’s exactly what I’ll be talking about tomorrow!

And more COVID-19 data updates, as long as we need them.

Graphs day 64, pandemic day 70, day 141 since the first cases were diagnosed. Remember how I said I was resuming my normal Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting schedule and I would post COVID-19 data updates on all other days?

lol like I was actually going to not make graphs

Also, take a look at my post earlier today, examining one of the most persistent misconceptions about our response to COVID-19.

Total cases diagnosed worldwide: 4,861,456

Current worldwide deaths: 323,046

I am making two sanity-preserving compromises in today’s update. First, I am presenting the graphs with less commentary than usual. Second, I am skipping the most time-consuming parts: adjusting the line widths to represent case fatality rate, and updating the data labels. So, don’t read into the line widths on the case graph, and know that the graphs will look weird when labels overlap lines – but here are today’s graphs.

Cases per million people by country

Deaths per million people by country

More complete update coming tomorrow. In the meantime, 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, and I’m happy to help you figure it out!

Update tomorrow, and every day(-ish) until this pandemic is over.

Thank you all for your enthusiasm about my project to make daily(-ish) updated maps of the state of the COVID-19 epidemic in various countries around the world. I’m glad that I have been able to provide a resource that many of you have found useful. I will continue to post updates, but I will also return to my regular schedule of posting new content here most every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

I’ve had some fascinating discussions with many of you on various social media platforms about various aspects of the data, and what it means for evaluating our species’ response to the pandemic. Today I want to focus on a question that a friend asked me as part of our discussion on Facebook – and yes, I promise this is an actual friend, not one of those “my friend has a problem” “friends.”

We were talking about how various U.S. states have issued shelter-at-home orders and told businesses to close. Was this a reasonable thing to do? Is the reduction in COVID-19 deaths worth the economic damage that closing so many businesses will likely cause? In the course of this discussion, my friend asked a question I’ve heard in many other places, but I’ve never seen discussed in the way I would like to see it:

Should the government shut down all swimming pools to keep people from drowning?

The answer is No, but the real answer is that this is a terrible and misleading analogy that has no bearing on the COVID-19 epidemic. Let’s explore why, in the way that I like to explore questions on this blog: with data.

To begin to see the difference, the first question we should ask is: how many people per year die by drowning in the U.S.? Obviously, even a single death is a tragedy to someone – but equally obviously, there is a big difference between something that kills 10 people per year and something that kills 10,000 people per year.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, between 2005 and 2014, an average of 3,858 Americans drowned per year (and it’s usually better to use a multi-year average to remove year-to-year fluctuations). Let’s assume that an equal number of people drown every day of the year – I know that in reality, more people drown on weekends in the summer, but we need to compare to a cause of death that has so far killed people only in March, April, and early May. So, let’s assume that since January 1st, 2020, 3858/366 = about 11 people per day have died by drowning. Add them up to get a cumulative death count per day from then until today, May 20th, 2020. Here’s how they compare:

Deaths so far this year by cause

Simple model of drowning deaths: 1,468

Actual deaths due to COVID-19: 91,921

But there’s even more to it than that: drowning isn’t contagious, COVID-19 is! If you have the ill fortune to be there when someone drowns, that does not increase your chances of drowning. We’ll explore the implications of that simple fact in my next post, coming Friday.

Graphs day 63, pandemic day 69 dudes!, day 140 since the first cases were diagnosed.

Total cases diagnosed worldwide: 4,766,468

Current worldwide deaths: 318,201

Worldwide, COVID-19 continues to grow at a steady rate of about 80,000 cases and 6,000 deaths per day. We may in fact be ahead of my recent prediction, as it looks like we might hit five million cases this Friday (May 22nd).

Non-essential businesses are beginning to open throughout the United States. It is almost certainly too early to safely do so, although as I discuss below, there are some encouraging signs that the rates of new cases and deaths are slowing down in the U.S. Even more encouraging news to be discussed below comes from Slovenia, which recently became the first European country to declare and end to its local COVID-19 epidemic.

I will also be returning to pre-pandemic activity by writing a new blog post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, separate from my daily tracking of the COVID-19 epidemic. On other days, I will provide data updates as I have done for months now.

Cases per million people by country

It’s an odd-numbered day, so let’s look at how the pandemic has played out in real time in various countries since mid-February. Just for today, India is out so I can show Slovenia.

One more change to today’s map of case rates by country – I realized that the map’s color scale should really be the same as the graph’s y-axis scale. So I changed the color scale of the map to have a maximum of 5,000 cases per million. Qatar is still off the scale.

Those are the total number of cases today, and here is the history of cases in our ten selected countries, today including Slovenia:

The curve for Slovenia has been basically flat for more than a month, with fewer than 500 new cases in total reported since April 15th – in a country with a population of more than two million. Congratulations, Slovenia! Be like Slovenia.

Deaths per million people by country

Here is the map of deaths per million people for the usual countries, and also Slovenia. The color scale is the same as ever.

and here is the history of deaths per million people:

The curve for Slovenia is massively flat in this view too. And the curve of deaths per million people in the U.S. is finally, finally beginning to turn over. It’s still hard to see in the graph, but it becomes clearer when looking at the raw numbers. Over the last few days, the U.S. has averaged about 800 deaths per day, down from about 1,700 per day last week and 3,000 per day last month. Experts still believe that it is too early to reopen most businesses in the U.S., but at least the slowing down of the death rate is a bit of good news for a country that desperately needs some good news.

If you want to see the recent deaths rates in the U.S. – or anything else! – I highly encourage you to look for yourself. 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, and I’m happy to help you figure it out!

Different topic tomorrow, but still COVID-19-related. And regular updates continuing as long as the pandemic continues.