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The countries with the most confirmed coronavirus cases: a visualization

Data can never tell us the whole story. But it can give us some hints about how the world is doing at this moment.

Mihai Andrei
March 26, 2020 @ 3:21 pm

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The COVID-19 situation is changing so fast it’s hard to keep up. It’s important to keep in mind that these numbers don’t really tell us much about how many people really are infected — only how many have been confirmed through testing.

We hope that the following visual presentations can help you get a more visual understanding of the situation. We are thankful to Datawrapper for maintaining these charts.

Countries with most confirmed coronavirus cases

Unfortunately, we expect that the list of countries with over 1,000 cases will grow in the not-too-distant future. It’s also important to note that in addition to the fact that these are just confirmed cases, the chart might also be misleading because it doesn’t say anything about the number of cases relative to each country’s population.

The countries with the fastest rate of growth of coronavirus cases

It’s not just the total number of cases — the rate of growth is also a valuable indicator. Here are the countries with the fastest rate of coronavirus growth. Again, these are just confirmed cases.

This does not say much about the overall scale of the outbreak in a particular area, just about the recent rate of change.

Here is a visual representation of the data above (only for selected areas and countries). The chart has a logarithmic scale:

The most affected continents

At the time of this writing, Europe is the new epicenter of the outbreak, but the US is catching up fast. Asia has stabilized, but might see a second wave coming. The number of cases in Africa is very low, but again, these are just confirmed cases — the real situation might be very different.

Again, a more visual representation of the data above:

How the world is doing

COVID-19 is truly a global pandemic.

At the time of this writing, the number of confirmed cases seems to rise and even accelerate.

It’s important to keep in mind that data and charts only show one side of the story. The true impact of this pandemic is the one each and every one of us are feeling. The people who are threatened, the drama in the hospitals, the desperate measures carried out to save lives.

More than ever before, we are all in this together, and no chart or map can truly represent that.

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