Active Covid-19 cases visualized on a map per million - update April 4th with USA and Canada

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

On March 17 and March 22 I showed charts of the number of active cases of Covid-19 around the world, colour-coded to make trends more visible. Here is an update as of April 4th.

The purpose of these posts is to present information that I haven't seen elsewhere. Active cases indicate how badly each country is currently experiencing the disease. Most existing charts show either total cases or total cases per capita, whereas active cases per capita I think is more useful. The choice of colours is designed to differentiate countries with different experinces. Clearly the data has weaknesses due to delayed reporting and differences in testing rates, but I think the information is still useful.

The first chart uses the same colour-coding I used in the previous posts, where my top colour was red, indicating 100 or more active cases per million.



The above is still good at showing which countries are experiencing the pandemic severely (now including Canada). But many countries have gone well beyond 100 active cases per million since my earlier charts, so I have created a new colour scheme below to show the more extreme cases. Red still anchors the 100 cases per million, but now I have added light blue to show the most extreme activity rates (Italy, Iceland, Spain), and purple to show the bad, but near-extreme rates (USA, Germany, France, Portugal, Ireland and so on). I have stopped using green for the very lowest cases because it looked like 'all clear'.



Here is a detailed breakdown of Canada and the USA using the above scale (active cases per million)



This shows New York in the extreme category, as has been widely reported in the news. But it also shows New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts,  Michigan and Louisiana in that category. It shows Quebec as having the biggest problems in Canada, being in a near-extreme situation. But it also shows several US States in a near-extreme situation.

Data source for Canada was CTV news. Data source for world and USA was Worldometer. As before, these were created using Microsoft Excel's built-in mapping capability.