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The virus continues apace. Here's the latest as of 31-03-2020 at 13:15 UK time.
Italy has suffered 192 deaths per million people, with Spain next on 157.
It's approaching 2 weeks ago that the UK introduced social distancing measures but no obvious sign that the death rate has been affected.
On the 23rd March, if what I said is true about the UK being 2 weeks behind Italy, we should expect the UK to reach 67 deaths per million on the 6th April. Currently the UK is at 21 per million with doubling happening every 3 days or so. Anything significantly below 67 would be evidence that social distancing and lock down is working.
Some updated graphs showing how the per capita death rate is still rising. I added South Korea and China.
This graph shows all the data.
This shows how China got on top of their outbreak almost before it had started in many countries.
This graph zooms in to the dates after March 1st.
It looks like it won't be long before France and the Netherlands will exceed the per capita death rate in Iran. It also looks like Spain will exceed Italy relatively soon.
The data sources for these are the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control for the mortality data and the World Bank for population data.
Of course, I don't know how many of the deaths would have happened anyway but a crude estimate based on data from the World Population Review web site gives 9.1 and 10.6 deaths per 1,000 per year for Spain and Italy respectively. The populations of Spain and Italy are approximately 47 million and 60 million respectively so in a year we would expect 428,000 and 636,000 deaths in these countries per year or 1,172 and 1,742 per day assuming a constant rate (which is a gross simplification). Both these countries are currently experiencing around 600 to 700 Corona virus deaths each per day, so we can say that we are not exceeding the background normal mortality. This underlines the need to be certain that the Corona deaths are classified correctly so my homework is to read in to the source Corona mortality data to understand how it is being gathered.
I've been exploring the latest figures for Corona virus deaths and I've combined this with population data to get an interesting graph.
This shows the deaths per million of the population of a country. The Y axis is a logarithmic scale. The X axis is date from the 1st March. I chose to plot this number for each country because death rates and population are numbers that are easy to understand and are less susceptible to misinterpretation.
As of today, 23/3/20, Italy is suffering 91 deaths per million in the country. On 04/03/20, the rate for Italy was 1.3 per million. Spain is suffering 36.8 deaths per million at the moment with 1 death per million back on 12/03/20.
What is interesting is the relative shapes of these graphs and their steepness between countries. For example, the UK, where I live, currently stands at 4.2 deaths per million. Italy was at that rate on 09/03/20. If we assume the growth continues because Italy and the UK look similar, we might conclude that we will be at the same place as Italy in 14 days time. This may be behind the UK prime minister's statement that we are 2 weeks behind Italy.
Of note too is Iran, where the graph is diverging from Italy perhaps indicating that the measures in the former country are having an effect. It's also interesting to see that Spain has a very steep graph and will soon overtake Italy as the most impacted country in terms of death rates per million of population. It's also interesting to see that Belgium and the Netherlands are rising very quickly and the slope of their lines looks similar to the US.
