The government have been keen to make international COVID-19 comparisons when favourable, and to claim that comparisons are dubious when they are unfavourable. At the same time, most of the charts shown in the media are next to useless. So here is a chart type you won't have seen. It shows new deaths against total deaths for different countries. Things to note: Most charts you will have seen have time on the horizontal access. Here we have total deaths. This shows the underlying relationship much better, and eliminates the difference in epidemic start dates between countries. Total deaths only ever increase, so time progresses from left to right for each country, but not in a linear fashion. The new deaths are smoothed out by averaging over the previous seven days. This eliminates weekly cycles and some anomalies of data collection. Both axes have logarithmic scales. The linear section of each county's data represents the exponential part of the growth in the
Simon Dobson's occasional musings, invectives and miscellaneous nonsense