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Half of the following statements are false. Find out which by interacting with the visualisation dashboard below.

  • During the first two years of the pandemic, Chile had a 50% increase in its total yearly death toll (from all causes) compared to the average of the previous five years.
  • The COVID-19 death toll for New Zealand in 2021 and 2022 was similar to its yearly death toll of suicide (you might need to check some death data for this).
  • USA had about 3 times more COVID-19 cases in the begining of 2022 compared to the same time the year before (with about the same amount of tests carried out).
  • Australia had approximatelly 25% more total deaths (from all causes) in 2021 and 2022 compared to the average of the previous 5 years.
  • Russia, Cuba, and the US have approximately the same vaccination rate.
  • More people died from covid-19 in 2020, than the number of deaths caused by wars, violent crimes, terrorism, and drug abuse combined in a year (you might need to check some death data for this).

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.

Click on the map to select a country

World

Total
Cases:
Total cases
2020:
2021:
2022:
Deaths:
Total deaths
2020:
2021:
2022:
Fully vaccinated:
+ booster shot:
New (7 day average)
Cases per 1m:
Deaths per 1m:
Cases
Hospitalizations
No data available
No data available
Deaths
Weekly death toll for all causes
No data available

*Sources: Confirmed, deaths, recovered, active data: Johns Hopkins University. Downloaded
Test & vaccination data: Our World in Data. Downloaded
Historical weekly death toll: Human Mortality Database. University of California, Berkeley (USA), and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany). Downloaded at 14/10/2022.

Wherever you were, chances are that sometime during 2020 you were told to stay home. Some governments merely outlined recommendations for the public, but most enforced rules to make citizens comply. Here you can see a rough visualization of government responses when it came to public movement restrictions. For simplicity I am only using 4 broad categories of responses, but you can find more specific information by hovering over each country. The four categories range from no restrictions imposed (although recommendations were typically made), to movement restrictions only in parts of the country, to restrictions for the whole country but only in particular times (curfew), to restrictions in the whole country all of the time (lockdown). Of course, many more government responses were put in place at the same time like banning gatherings, imposing social distancing rules, closing businesses etc, but the scope of this visualisation remains solely the movement restriction policies.

*Source: Oxford University. Downloaded at 10/01/2021


K
April 8, 2020, 9:53 a.m.

Nice!


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