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COVID-19: The First 20 Days – Cases vs Deaths

April 7, 2020

In this post, I thought I’d share with you a quick glance of what it looks like for every country that has had at least 20 days since hitting 1,000 cases, as of April 7, 2020.

Let’s get started. First we will look at total confirmed cases. To orient yourself with my chart, the date along the x-axis is the date that the given country hit their first 1,000 cases. Each bar within a given countries section represents each day after hitting 1,000 cases, up to day 20.

Number of Confirmed Cases in the first 20 days since hitting 1,000 cases

You can quickly see that the U.S. and Spain dominated the climb of confirmed cases. However, as we all know by now, this can vary based on infection rates, how many tests were given in that country, and eventually the population size.

It looks like the top countries for highest confirmed cases within the first 20 days (after hitting 1,000 cases) are:

  1. U.S.
  2. Spain
  3. China
  4. Germany
  5. Italy


So, let’s take a look at the exact same chart, but I will throw number of deaths in there, instead of confirmed cases.

Number of Deaths in the first 20 days since hitting 1,000 cases

What a difference it makes by looking at a different metric.

It looks like the top countries for highest *deaths* within the first 20 days (after hitting 1,000 cases) are:

  1. Spain
  2. Italy
  3. U.S.
  4. U.K.
  5. France


Looking at death rates instead of confirmed cases is likely a better metric to be looking at when looking at infection rates because of the lack of testing and the varying rate of testing per capita between countries. Even though the death rates will also have variability in its accuracy between countries, it is likely a better candidate to see how things are progressing.

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