Last update: 5th December, 2020
What this page is not.
This is my take on the analysis of the available data for the pandemic. This page is not a way of predicting what’s going to happen with the pandemic. I’m not that smart nor pretend to be. For that we have professional people in charge around the world working right now (and even before this all blew up). I hope only to translate the data to make it easily understandable and show what’s really happening through graphs.
The data
The page shows the data from countries registered on the records from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering. The number of cases, this is, how many people have tested positive for coronavirus, is a piece of data that needs to be handled cautiously. Not all the countries have the same resources so they are not doing the same number of tests proportionally to their population. So, registered cases are just that, and they don’t imply anything else other than knowing how many people have been tested.
Ok, so is this a fair comparison then?
No. There are so many factors that should be included and it’s almost impossible to measure them, that there is no way to compare countries. A virus outbreak is worse where the density of population is bigger. As an example, Spain has a density of 93 people/km2 and Sweden 23 people/km2. And these numbers are just averages, so you should also check how many cities Spain and Sweden have with a bigger density of population than a particular threshold. But, what threshold should you determine? And we are talking about factors that somehow we can measure, but what about lifestyle, movement of people, tourism, (and how tourists move around the country, do they visit just Stockholm or move around several cities in Spain?), geography location of a country (New Zealand is doing great thanks to the government but obviously their geography isolation is helping too), percentage of old population (and how much they move or interact with their family, and their health conditions)… So, no, there is no fair comparison.
The graphs
All graphs are interactive: double click on a country on the legend and only that trace is shown, then click on others to add them to the graph. Double click on a white area of the legend to bring back the original graph.
Legends are all organised in descending order (higher on the legend is worse) and the names correspond from top to bottom to the traces of the graph.
The most important graph of all (if you are going to see just one graph, this is the one)
It would be an error to compare how ‘well’ every country is doing against the rest by just looking at today’s number of cases per population, because due to lockdowns and travel decrease countries are in different states of the pandemic. Like in a cycling race against the clock, you would measure every cyclist at determined checkpoints of the track because not all of them start at the same time. This is what the next graph shows: traces from all the 20 countries with most cases per 100.000 people have been shifted so the starting point (t=0) is the first day when the cases per 100K people were greater than 30.
Summing up, this graph is the fairest visual when comparing the pandemic state in every country, as it measures the pandemic proportionally to their population both on time and amount of cases:
Number of cases per 100k people.
Shows top worst 20 countries in descending order. Synchronised starting point at 30 cases per 100k people. Click and drag to zoom in.
Cumulative confirmed cases.
Shows top worst 20 countries in descending order
Cumulative deaths.
Shows top worst 20 countries in descending order
New daily cases per 100k people
On the graph above you can see the ‘waves’ for a selection of countries. All traces are a 7 day rolling average of the original raw data.
WORLD New daily cases
Let’s now forget about countries and borders — as this pandemic is affecting the whole planet as a whole, isn’t it?– and see the absolute new daily cases in the world in the graph above. Again, data in the graph is a 7 day rolling average of the original raw data.
And last a heat map of the world showing in a scale of reds the daily new cases recorded since 22/01/2020 for 189 countries.
* Data of the pandemic from Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE) Population for each country (2018) from the World Bank Group.
** Thanks to Guillermo Mercapide for his help gathering data and ideas for this page.
