Maps of Covid-19 cases - March 22, 2020

[Edit: My next post on this subject is here]

On March 17, I published a visualization of Covid-19 cases per million people. We are now 5 days later, so below is an update using the same scale. This map shows the total number of cases accumulated over time, per million. One can now see that the US situation has rapidly worsened, and is similar to Europe (red) having surpassed China.

Australia, Canada and a few South American countries are now in orange, meaning that they are catching up.

Grey cells are those lacking data (e.g. North Korea).




This is not 'new news'. The importance of this visualization is that it shows trends that are less visible in other visualizations. I have been criticized by some people for publishing data that is already well known. The point, however, is that I am not publishing raw data, or even surprising results, but rather making certain aspects of the data more visible.

I have also been criticized for generating visualizations from data that is inevitably inaccurate. In particular, the source data does not account for 'community spread' cases where no tests have been done. Countries that have been able to do more testing of potential cases will appear to have more cases. But this is the best data we have, and I think it is still useful to see these visualizations.

Next I would like to show a visualization of Active cases per million. This is designed to highlight the forward-looking danger to the population and the health care system. Active cases don't include the cases that have been resolved (by people recovering or dying), and suggests the potential for spread. I have used a different colour coding from the above so readers do not think it is the same type of data.

The very dark countries are seemingly out of control with 500 or more cases per million and, presumably, the likelihood of rampant spreading unless there is very strict quarantine and extensive testing to find all new cases. We see this particularly in Iceland (1574), Switzerland (856), Italy (770), Spain (529), and Norway (422) . Again, this is not new data; we know about Italy and Spain from the news, but the situation in the other black or very dark orange countries is not so widely reported (at least in the Canadian media).

Orange cases are at 100 cases per million, and include the US (117). These countries are in real danger.

The fainter the orange the more likely that, just perhaps, the country could keep this under control with decent isolation methods. Canada is at 38.

It is notable that China has now dropped far down on this scale (as has been well reported in the news). It is at 4. Not everybody is confident that the Chinese situation is accurate, but we can only do the best we can with reported data.



Finally, below is a visualization of Active cases per doctor. This shows the current pressure on the medical system. This is very similar to the above, but a few countries have more risk because of fewer doctors per capita.

Very dark countries have one case or more per doctor. They are in a desperate situation.

Bright red countries have 0.1 case per doctor. This includes Canada. Once again, the US is doing worse than Canada, although it has a way to go before catching up to many European Countries.



The pandemic data for these visualizations comes from the Worldometer website. The population data and number of doctors comes from the built-in Excel data sources, as compiled by Microsoft.

I will periodically update these charts so people can see the progression.

Last week I was super-busy working my Vice-Dean role, helping work on policies and processes for the conduct of final assessments to be undertaken by University of Ottawa students who are working remotely now.