Last Easter holidays I set up this COVID-19 dashboard in one of my personal domains to follow the cases around the world, particularly in Europe. I used the data provided by the Johns Hopkins University, in particular their daily cases, deaths, and recoveries time series. Using those data points and doing some data wrangling it’s possible to get a lot of insights about what’s currently happening in the world.

The last time I blogged about this topic was exactly one month ago and there have been a lot of developments since then:

• In April I mentioned the US has become the new epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and that’s still the case, but on a different scale. With over 1.3 million active cases, the United States accounts for 32.5% of all cases worldwide today. The situation in New York City is much better than it was then, but there are now multiple cases in rural areas, particularly in towns with meat processing plants
• The situation in the United Kingdom is dire as well. As of yesterday they have reported 31.3k deaths and 216.5k active cases, and they have less than 1k patients recovered from the disease. Famously, Boris Johnson got infected himself, requiring hospitalization and even ICU admission for a couple of days.
• In contrast, Germany has been recognized as one of the countries that has dealt with the pandemic in a responsible way using a science-based approach. They are still in the list of the Top 10 countries most affected by the disease but the death rate has been really low during the evolution of the pandemic.
• The Kiwi strategy has been one of the most successful ones in the world. A headline in the prestigious Lancet magazine summarises it all: New Zealand eliminates COVID-19. The administration of Jacinda Ardern couldn't be more proud of their decisions!

I have been waking up quite early these days. A couple of days ago I was lucky to get this beautiful and peaceful sunrise.

Talking about exponential growth ... back on the 31st of January, when I heard the novel coronavirus mentioned in the news I blogged about how there were "9776 cases confirmed affecting 20 countries already, with the vast majority in China", regarding this '2019-nCoV' virus as it was known back then.

2.5 months later, this number has jumped to more than 1.5 million cases, becoming a pandemic, affecting most of the nations in the world. Italy and Spain were hard hit, as well as the US, a country that has become by far the new epicenter of this disease.

The strict social distancing rules have slowed down the transmission in the communities adopting these measures (with the unfortunate side effect of paralyzing the economies). Let's cross our fingers that all those efforts will contain this nasty virus.

The COVID-19 cases continue to climb in the world, and the United States of America clearly have become the new epicenter with 85,991 confirmed cases, 18,050 more compared with the previous day. They really need to set up a working national policy!

According to the latest data aggregated by the Johns Hopkins University world cases dashboard, there are 307277 COVID-19 confirmed cases in the world. Europe is still an epicenter of the disease with more than 50k cases in Italy, but also more than 10k cases in France, Germany and Spain.

There are more deaths reported in Italy (4825) than were reported in China (3265). The US has the highest number of active cases (26747) after Italy.

In many places of the world there are measures in place to encourage or force people to stay home. Please stay safe!

Next page