Covid-19

Cases numbers are the confirmed cases, so the number of people who have tested positive to covid-19. Of course, since the beginning of the pandemic, we know that this number is not accurate, as not everyone gets tested and / or recorded in official figures. Testing strategies have differed significantly across countries and stages of the pandemic impacting significantly the confirmed cases figures.

Death data might be a better metric to gauge the impact of the pandemic at a certain time, but again it is not perfect. Covid-19 deaths are counted slightly differently in different places. Sometimes even on the same place in different times. For instance, in the UK, up until the 12 of August of 2020 all deaths following a positive covid-19 test were counted in the covid-19 death sum. Then, officials decided to only include deaths occurring up until 28 days after the initial positive test cutting down the total number of deaths by over 5 thousand. In many other countries, covid-19 needs to be specifically listed in the causes of death of a patient. And of course, covid-19 is rarely the only cause of death, so how do I even know what the patient died from?! First of all, take a deep breath and relax. You can’t know, but the professionals filling out those death certificates have had some practice. This is not a new problem. Terminally ill people are very often challenged in multiple fronts. Another way to look at death data, is to simply sum up all deaths occurring over a week and compare the total weekly sums with previous years. The gross simplification here is that any excess deaths this year should correspond to covid-19’s impact. True, but impact is not just people directly dying from covid-19, but also from the side effects of the pandemic. Like hospitals being full, patients avoiding to visit them out of fear and so on.

To get an idea of how bad the health care system was hit, we can look at the number of people who were hospitalised or even put into ICUs (intensive care units) due to covid-19. We have 2 different kinds of metrics here, one about the total number of patients in hospitals (or ICUs) in any given time, and another about new admissions. I am showing data for the first kind of data where possible, but you might notice that we only have new admissions data for some countries, others only report on hospitalizations or ICUS but not both, and for many countries we do not have any relevant data at all.

Although not all data matches, it still gives us an indication of what is going on. So, play with the parameters and use the map to get a rough idea of what is going on around the world. Different policies and metrics make it harder to simply compare numbers between countries, but ultimately, the numbers are more useful if seen like body weight readings. Sure, you can compare your number with everyone else’s, but it’s probably more useful to just compare it with the one you had a week ago, a month ago or a year ago.

In this regard, the various bar charts should give you an idea of how cases or deaths compare to the past few weeks or months. These graphs are primarily useful to detect spikes and plateaus of the disease spread and impact.

The weekly death toll is a clear testament that something is going on the past couple of years that we should be paying attention to. Beyond debates of how deadly the virus is, whether the patients were old and sickly and would die by the flu instead, or whether it even exists or not, here is a clear metric of the cost of life of the pandemic and how we handle it.