Graphs day 21, pandemic day 27, day 98 since the first cases were diagnosed. More than 1.3 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and nearly 75,000 have died. Our usual graphs are below. The rate of new cases and deaths continues to increase roughly linearly. A linear increase results in way fewer sick and dead people than an exponential increase.
What would be even better than linearly increasing? No longer increasing at all. And we’ll get there – if we keep doing everything we are doing. Keep your distance, wash your hands, and follow the advice of medical and public health professionals.
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 to make your own graphs.
Update tomorrow, and every day after that until this pandemic is over.
Graphs day 20, pandemic day 26, day 97 since the first cases were diagnosed. More than 1.2 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and more than 68,000 have died. The good news is that in all three of today’s graphs, it definitely looks like the exponential phase of growth is over pretty much everywhere. But the rate of cases and deaths is still growing, and this pandemic will still get worse before it gets better.
The most important thing I can say about these graphs is that they show that the curve is starting to flatten, and the curve is starting to flatten BECAUSE we are taking the right steps! Don’t stop now – keep isolating! We are starting to turn it around, but there is still a lot more work to do.
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 to make your own graphs.
Update tomorrow, and every day after that until this pandemic is over.
Graphs day 19, pandemic day 25, day 96 since the first cases were diagnosed. COVID-19 has now reached even the distant Falkland Islands. The worldwide graph just keeps increasing, and now more than 64,000 people have died.
Comparing rates in different countries
The good news comes from the graph of case rates in different countries. It wasn’t clear before, but today we can definitely see that the case rate is decreasing in France, Belgium, and even Spain.
And we can maybe see the same downturn happening in the United Kingdom and the United States. Maybe. If it’s there, it’s a little clearer in the graph with equivalent starting points:
Cases, deaths, and country populations come from the datasets of the European Centers for Disease Control’s Coronavirus Source Data site (download the CSV file at “all four metrics”), and I hope you find my Excel template useful for creating your own graphs.
Hopefully more good news tomorrow, and hopefully every day after that until this pandemic is over.
Grapheration day 18, pandemic day 24, day 95 since Wuhan. COVID-19 has now reached even the distant Falkland Islands. Nearly 1.1 million people have been diagnosed, and more than 56,000 have died. The graph of worldwide cases and deaths keeps screaming on ahead.
Comparing rates in different countries
Once more unto the graph, dear friends, once more – cases of coronavirus over time in various countries from February 22nd to today. Same color scheme, and once again line thickness represents the case fatality rate in different countries, from Italy (12 percent) to Australia (0.4 percent). Except now, France has replaced Germany as the purple line.
Several people have asked what the graph would look like if we evened out the countries, and plotted them all with the same starting event. There are various choices for the starting event to plot, I chose the date on which the case rate reached one case in one million. Here’s what it looks like:
Usual disclaimers: I’m not an expert, I’m just a guy on the Internet who likes to make graphs of things. I hope I’ve shown you some ways you can look into COVID-19 data for yourself. You can find the data from the European Centers for Disease Control’s Coronavirus Source Data site (download the CSV file from the “Full dataset” link), and you are welcome to use my Excel template.
Update tomorrow, and every day until this pandemic is over.
Grapheration day 17, pandemic day 23, day 94 since Wuhan. Yesterday we had our one millionth case of COVID-19, and that milestone shows up in today’s data update. Six countries experienced their first deaths from COVID-19 yesterday, including Kyrgyzstan, Mauritania, and Gibraltar. The disease has now killed over 50,000 people.
So far I’ve been presenting cases and deaths on two separate graphs, meaning you have had to look back and forth between two graphs to get the full story.
Well, sadly enough people have now died that you can now clearly see the story when they are graphed on the same axis.
The case fatality rate of COVID-19 worldwide is about 5 percent, meaning that approximately five out of every one hundred cases ends in death. For comparison, seasonal flu has a case fatality rate of less than 0.1 percent, and even smallpox’s was about one percent.
Comparing rates in different countries
That leads in to the other big disadvantage of showing cases and deaths in two separate graphs. Looking back and forth across two similar-looking graphs obscures an important part of the story: for a variety of reasons, different countries have different case fatality rates.
But we’re graphing several countries at once – if we tried to put cases and deaths as separate lines, the graph would quickly get very hard to read. So how can we show all these factors together on one graph?
I think I figured out an approach, and I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this approach and whether you have any other ideas. I’ll plot cases only, but use the thickness of the line to represent the case fatality rate in each country. Now that the line thicknesses represent meaningful data, I had to make them all solid lines. Hopefully the line labels let you identify which country is which. To keep the total number of lines down, I removed France (sorry Greg). Also, Spain is now gold and Switzerland is now orange because reasons. And so:
I’m working on a few other visualizations as well.
Usual disclaimers: I’m not an expert, I’m just a guy on the Internet who likes to make graphs of things. I hope I’ve shown you some ways you can look into COVID-19 data for yourself. You can find the data from the European Centers for Disease Control’s Coronavirus Source Data site (download the CSV file from the “Full dataset” link). I have once again updated my Excel template (to adjust the line thicknesses), please use it.
Update tomorrow, and every day until this pandemic is over.
