Graphs day 72, pandemic day 78, day 149 since the first cases were diagnosed. The United States has now passed both Belgium and Spain to become the major country with the highest rate of COVID-19 in the world.
Cases and deaths worldwide
Total cases of COVID-19 diagnosed worldwide: 5,656,615
Total deaths: 355,355
Worldwide cases of, and deaths due to, COVID-19
The trend of worldwide cases continues to be ahead of the predictions that I made on May 17th, although the growth in new cases has slowed down somewhat. The number of deaths continues to be slightly behind my May 17 predictions, although the growth in deaths is increasing.
Cases per million people by country
Compare today’s maps with the ones you have seen the last several days. The comparison reveals that case numbers are stabilizing in Europe, and are rapidly increasing in South America.
Maps of case rates per million people in Europe (left) and the Americas (right), with values for key countries labeled
I am continuing to track the data for the “Big Ten” countries: the United States, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Russia, Sweden, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and India.
Today is an even-numbered day, so here is a graph of total cases per million people per day elapsed since each country’s day zero (defined as the day the case rate reached 1 in 1,000,000):
Total cases per million per day (relative to each country’s “day zero”) for each of 10 countries
On day 81 of the U.S. epidemic, the United States passed Belgium and Spain to become the country with the highest rate of COVID-19 diagnosis among these 10 countries. The curves for Italy, Belgium, and even Spain are nearly flat, so I may do what would have been unthinkable back on day 30 – stop tracking these countries and replace them with others. Italy, Belgium, and Spain are – at least for now – major success stories in fighting COVID-19. The story isn’t over yet, though. We’ll continue to keep an eye on all these countries, and we’ll occasionally revisit other countries we looked at before.
If I do drop Italy, Spain, and/or Belgium, what other countries would you like to see graphed?
Deaths per million people by country
Here’s the map of deaths per million people by country:
Maps of deaths per million people in Europe (left) and the Americas (right), with values for key countries labeled
and here is the graph of cases per million people per day, since each country’s day zero:
The good news for the United States is that, even though the case rate is higher than other countries, the death rate is a bit lower. And if you’re wondering what happened with the up-and-down in Spain, I wrote about that yesterday.
If you want to try any of this analysis 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 are welcome to use my Excel template (version 3.3). 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 after that until this pandemic comes to an end.
Graphs day 70, pandemic day 76, day 147 since the first cases were diagnosed.
Total cases of COVID-19 diagnosed worldwide: 5,459,526
Total deaths: 345,944
Cases and deaths worldwide
I am continuing to track the predictions that I made on May 17th, based on data from April and the first half of May. We hit five million global cases a day early. Up next is six million cases, which I predicted would happen next Thursday, June 4th – and will almost certainly happen sooner. I figured out how to get Excel to forecast a trendline ahead, so I can compare my predictions (the black line in the graph below) to reality (the red dots from May 17th to today). We are, sadly, far ahead of schedule, and getting farther ahead every day.
Global cases and deaths due to COVID-19 since December 31, 2019
The good news is that we are running slightly behind my predictions of the number of deaths. I had predicted 400,000 deaths on this Sunday, June 1st. It might still happen then, or it might happen a bit later. I would be happy to be wrong about this, because it would mean less dead people by this time next week. Less dead people is good, I hope that’s not controversial.
The maps are back today (yay!) and day 70 is an even number, so we’ll look at case and death rates on a relative scale, with day zero being the date on which each country’s case rate reached one in 1,000,000. Both case and death data are given below, but I’d like you to focus particularly on deaths for reasons I will explain in a moment.
Cases per million people by country
I’ve started referring to our usual group of countries – the United States, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Russia, Sweden, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and India – as the Big 10. Unlike the Big 10 of college football, this Big Ten actually has 10 entities.
Maps of case rates in the Big 10 plus several other countries:
Maps of Europe and the Middle East (left) and the Americas (right) with cases per million people labeled
And the history of cases per million since each country’s day zero:
Cases per million people from day zero to day 100
It’s now day 80 in the U.S., and we are ahead of where every other country was on its day 80.
Deaths per million people by country
Here’s the map of deaths per million people by country:
Maps of Europe and the Middle East (left) and the Americas (right) with deaths per million people labeled
Note that Sweden now has 10 times the death rate of neighboring Norway.
Today’s most interesting data comes from the graph of deaths per million people in each of the Big 10 countries. See if you can spot something that looks incredibly weird here:
This is a graph of cumulative deaths in each country – so what’s up with Spain, where the curve goes DOWN at day 86? Have people come back to life? Is it a miracle? Are there now zombies roaming the plain in Spain?
Obviously not – it’s an adjustment to the data. Some deaths that had been previously classified as being due to COVID-19 have been reclassified as being due to other causes. The adjustment changed the total number of COVID-19 deaths in Spain (remember, this is total, not per million) from 28,752 to 26,384.
That’s a six percent adjustment to Spain’s total, and not even a blip to the global totals because another 5,000 people died yesterday and the global total still went up.
¡Adiós, conspiraciones!
This adjustment is important because there are persistent ridiculous conspiracy rumors that every country is inflating its COVID-19 death count by intentionally classifying non-COVID-19 deaths as being due to COVID-19. They are doing this to make COVID-19 appear like a bigger problem than it actually is, because… reasons. I’m not clear on that, and I don’t think they are either.
Spain just bid adiós to those conspiracies by adjusting their numbers down to better reflect reality as we now understand it. And for people who say that this adjustment just proves there is a conspiracy – well, which is it? Are numbers intentionally overreported or intentionally underreported? Would you like some to have some of the delicious cake that you just finished eating?
People who believe in conspiracy theories would like to have some of this cake, but they already ate it.
A milder form of this objection is making an adjustment to the data just proves that all the data is unreliable anyway, and I’m wasting my time even trying to graph it. First, dude, seriously? If you’re reading this blog, you probably know me and don’t mean to insult me – and even if you do, well, it was never about me.
Setting that aside, I can see why someone would ask that question, but actually the adjustment proves exactly the opposite – that they are doing everything they possibly can to get it right. Scientists don’t try to hide their mistakes, and a scientist’s first duty is always to the truth.
If you still think the data is useless, I’ll ask a question I often ask: what’s the alternative?
Would you prefer that they not adjust the data, and just stick with data that they once thought was correct but now know to be incorrect?
Are you proposing that everyone should always get it right the first time, and that anyone who changes their mind is completely unreliable? If so – then, since I know you’re the kind of person who would never be hypocritical enough to hold someone else to different standards than yourself – how is the “always get it right the first time” approach going for you?
Are you instead saying that since the data is unreliable, we should just give up? And not only ignore the data, but also ignore 300+ years of medical knowledge on how to stop epidemics in favor of useless half-measures like “wear a mask, but only when you feel like it?”
I continue to stand behind the data I am using here as the best estimate we have for the extent of COVID-19 in the world, and I continue to stand for using it to make the best decisions we know how to make.
If you want to try any of this analysis 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 are welcome to use my Excel template (version 3.3). 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 after that until this pandemic comes to an end.
Graphs day 69 dudes!, pandemic day 75, day 146 since the first cases were diagnosed.
Total cases of COVID-19 diagnosed worldwide: 5,371,700
Total deaths: 344,815
I’ve been playing with some new ways of visualizing the data. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s not clear what is the best way to show the number of cases. I’ve been showing cumulative graphs, in which the height of the curve on each day shows the total number of cases reported from the beginning of the pandemic.
The advantage of this approach is that it makes it easy to compare the overall toll of COVID-19 across countries. But a different approach would make it easier to see how the epidemic has evolved in real time: plotting the number of new cases reported on each day instead.
One potential problem with plotting new cases rather than cumulative total cases is that there can be major day-to-day variations in the number of cases, which can make it hard to see overall trends.
One way to address that concern about day-to-day variations is to “smooth” the data. That’s what I have done here. The blue line in the graph below shows the number of cases reported worldwide per day. The red line shows the smoothed data – the data point for each day has been replaced with the average value of that day, the five days before, and the five days after. That “10-day moving average smoothed” data is shown by the red line.
The red line shows the same overall trends as the blue line, with most of the daily variation removed. It’s much easier to tell the overall trend from the red line. And the overall trend is: we are very much in the middle of this pandemic.
Stay tuned for more graphs like this over the next week.
Cases by country
The rest of this update will be the graphs as I usually make them. Still no maps yet. Today is an even-numbered day, we’ll look at graphs of the number of cases per million people in real time as the virus has moved around the world.
The curve for the U.S. is now hidden behind the curve for Belgium, although the case rate in the U.S. is slightly higher (4,964 reported cases per million vs. 4,926 per million in Belgium). The curve will soon pass the curve for Spain as well, and then the graph will once again be easy to read. For the worst possible reason.
Also, Saudi Arabia seems to have joined Russia in switching from an accelerating growth rate to a constant growth rate, while it seems I was wrong yesterday – the growth rate in Brazil seems to still be accelerating.
Deaths by country
In terms of deaths per million people:
The United Kingdom has caught up to Italy.
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 are welcome to use my Excel template (version 3.3). 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 after that until this pandemic comes to an end.
Graphs day 68, pandemic day 74, day 145 since the first cases were diagnosed.
Total cases of COVID-19 diagnosed worldwide: 5,273,572
Total deaths: 341,722
As the graph below shows, the rate of new cases continues to increase above the linear fit I had calculated before. That means we’ll hit six million cases well before my original prediction of June 4th.
A change to the ECDC schema broke my Python script, so no maps until I get that figured out. It’s just a matter of some time and stubbornness, so it shouldn’t be more than a few days.
Cases by country
Today is an even-numbered day, so here is the graph of the relative state of the epidemic, showing the number of cases by the number of days elapsed since the case rate reached 1 in 1,000,000.
The United States has now passed Belgium – not only Belgium at the equivalent point (day 78), but Belgium’s rate today. Spain is next. Brazil’s rate looks like it may have stabilized at a new, higher, value – but we’ll know for sure daqui a alguns dias.
Deaths by country
The graph of cumulative deaths by country continues to look roughly the same as it has for a the last month:
With case rates, it’s not clear whether the best thing to plot is the number of new cases per day (which would be more bell-curve-like) or cumulative cases, which is what I’ve been showing here. But with deaths, it’s clear that cumulative is the right thing to graph. Because the dead stay dead.
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 are welcome to use my Excel template (time for a version update, it’s now version 3.3). 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 after that until this pandemic comes to an end.
Depressingly, the rate at which new cases are diagnoses is once again increasing. Take a look at this plot of global cases and deaths, with best-fit lines showing the rate of new cases and deaths since April 1st. Look how each of dots representing the number of cases lie further and further above the line over the the last four days.
If this continues, I’ll have to redo my line fits and thus redo my predictions of when we will hit the next milestones of six million cases and 400,000 deaths.
Cases by country
In today’s maps, look for Belarus and Peru, both of which have turned a worrying shade of tomato red. We’ll keep watching both over the next few weeks.
And sadly another rescale on the graph, as the case rate in Spain has passed 5,000 per million people.
Despite that, the curve for Spain is remaining quite flat – which means that the curve for Spain will inevitably be passed by the curve for the United States, which continues to increase at a constant rate. Although they may all be passed by Brazil, whose curve is turning in entirely the wrong direction.
Deaths by country
The death rate in Sweden continues to creep up; it’s now nearly ten times that of neighboring Norway.
…and the death rate in the United Kingdom has nearly equaled that in Italy.
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 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 after that until this pandemic comes to an end.
