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 hit hard, 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 transmission in the communities adopting these measures (with the unfortunate side effect of paralyzing their economies). Let's cross our fingers that all those efforts will contain this nasty virus.

COVID-19 cases continue to climb around the world, and the United States of America has clearly become the new epicenter, with 85,991 confirmed cases, 18,050 more than 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 307,277 confirmed COVID-19 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 each 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 (26,747) after Italy.

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

According to the WHO, Europe has become the new epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic as the deadly coronavirus runs through Italy and nearby countries, including Germany, Switzerland, and France. It's the same situation in Spain, where the total number of cases increased dramatically during the last 2 days, leading the government to put in place drastic measures to slow down the transmission of the virus.

One month ago I was blogging about how the 2019-nCoV coronavirus had been in the news lately because of its human-to-human transmission and its rapid spread both in China and outside its borders.

At the end of January there were 9776 confirmed cases in China, but one month later this number was around 80k, and Iran, South Korea, and Italy had become additional hotspots with more than 1k cases.

The COVID-19 virus, as it's called now, is a public issue all around the world, and preventive measures will have to be in place to slow down the spread of this disease.

The following animation from Wikipedia shows how fast the virus has spread in a couple of months.

Again, for reference, this is the Johns Hopkins University world cases dashboard, using the most recent data available.

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