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COVID-19. How Well Are We Doing?


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 outbreak. When the exponential growth is over, the data falls off the main line. And this plot is particularly good for seeing when countermeasures might be having an impact.
  • The plot is poor at showing the first signs of a second wave of infection. You could use a similar graph with re-set total deaths to see new waves, but you would probably just use a time-based horizontal scale.
  • Given the similarity in the progressions, it seems that some international comparisons are valid. I've chosen to compare the main industrialized nations in Europe, and some other countries with major outbreaks and reliable data.
  • The points at which countries fall off the main line do not in themselves indicate how well governments have done to halt the disease. You need to interpret those points in the light of the counties' populations.
One thing that does look obvious is that Sweden experienced a second wave and probably a third wave.

It is also noticeable that Ireland's data has a prolonged segment slightly below and not parallel to the main line before falling off. This is difficult to explain. Perhaps there has been consistent mis-reporting of deaths for the segment.

So all the countries in the chart appear to have properly fallen off the main line, except for Sweden and possible USA. Here are the remaining countries' total deaths per million of population.

At first glance it appears that the Belgian government have done a poor job of protecting its people, but if you look at density map for the outbreak in Belgium you get a different perspective. It looks like they've done a good job overall apart from some leakage on the Southern border with France.

The really significant feature of the bar chart is that Germany has so far done an outstanding job at curbing the outbreak compared with the other large nations of Europe. Great Britain has the huge advantage of physical isolation but has a relative death rate over five times that of Germany. There can be little doubt that Germany did all the right things, and the other large countries, including the UK, did not.

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