Coronavirus Country Comparator

https://boogheta.github.io/coronavirus-countries/#deceased&ratio&places=Belgium,France,Germany,Italy,Spain,USA,United%20Kingdom&alignTo=deceased

by j4yav • 6 years ago

109 102 6 years ago

boogheta.github.io

arcticbull2• 6 years ago

This is incredibly pretty and deserves a serious round of applause.

The UI is gorgeous and very usable, the only thing that threw me is when you hover over a line, I wish it would show which country it corresponds to.

With that said I still find a log-log plot much easier to interpret, and so far, the gold standard on trend clarity visualization remains Aatish Bhatia's (https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/). Maybe a way to switch to a similar log/log scale? Otherwise it's very difficult to figure out when a given country approaches the knee.

blitmap• 6 years ago

I agree. This is the best one I've seen and I love that I can add/remove countries and switch between linear and log scale. Definitely add log-log.

(Thank you, this is great!)

amelius2• 6 years ago

Btw, the prettiest presentation I've seen so far is this one: https://www.covid.is/data

(though only for Iceland)

tabs_masterrace• 6 years ago

Looks nice and clean, not sure about the bouncy animations though. I mean these are charts of people dying, it doesn't fell all that appropriate. Simple ease out would be more fitting.

silon42• 6 years ago

Seems to have some issues in Firefox for me. Anyone else?

MiguelVieira2• 6 years ago

One thing this chart highlights is the unsung success stories among the US states. Some isolated and sparsely populated states are doing quite well: Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Vermont.

paul_f• 6 years ago

I would say some large states are also doing well per-capita - Texas, California, Florida - all three less than one-third the per-capita death rate for the country as a whole. California is 3X Montana, New York is 86X Montana.

ekianjo• 6 years ago

Nice, but such comparisons are kind of useless since the testing and reporting varies widely by country, so there's nothing you can compare when you look down into details.

tomgaga• 6 years ago

Yeah, I really don't understand why people are still comparing these numbers like this. It's much more objective to just compare "excess number of deaths compared to last year per million". Like the New York times did: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

easytiger• 6 years ago

That's also not useful. Compare with a season of flu outbreaks, which last year wasn't

ferzul• 6 years ago

the answer is simple: the data is there. you can't compare vietnam and germany on that page - if you can access it. (if i have to signup to read or buy, i'm not really interested. anonymous access used to be possible with paper, and it's still possible today)

hkai• 6 years ago

Beware of comparing deaths to last year though, I'd rather take a 5 year average

henrikschroder2• 6 years ago

At least this one doesn't include the case fatality rate which is the biggest bullshit number of them all. If nothing else, this pandemic has shown that bad data is so much worse than no data.

Edited to add: The daily statistic by population ratio is very spiky, and gets spikier the smaller the country is, which makes it hilariously useless. A rolling average would improve that a bit, but remember that some countries might be off with a factor of 2x or 3x when it comes to reported deaths, which is an insane level of uncertainty.

xg153• 6 years ago

It does allow comparing trends though. Yes, the actual numbers are not reliable, but whether numbers in a country are growing exponentially, growing linearly or stabilizing is comparable.

You can also make some indications if a country is doing unusually well or bad: If the ratio of cases/population or deaths/population were significantly different from most other countries, this would warrant a closer look.

crispyporkbites• 6 years ago

Nope. If the data is bad, looking more closely at the same data won’t help anything. In Covid 19 there are so many different variables in the way the data is reported that it’s completely pointless to draw any conclusions across counties, including where to focus further attention on.

alkonaut• 6 years ago

This. Comparisons hospital admissions, icu admissions, and all-cause excess deaths make sense. Comparing the number of tested or even the number of “known fatalities” works within a country as a trend but not across countries.

jobigoud• 6 years ago

I think only excess mortality makes sense. ICU admissions depends on ICU availabilty and has a ceiling when the system nears saturation so it's not very comparable, a country with very few ICU will have low numbers.

anoplus• 6 years ago

I would love to see testing capacity stats per country.

cvladan• 6 years ago

covidly.com ?

ghego1• 6 years ago

Very nice UI indeed, although the data does not seem to be up to date

amelius2• 6 years ago

Some missing features (imho):

- overlaying the graphs from the moment of the first case (shifting the data in time)

- ICU beds available/used

- overlay of measures taken (e.g. when did social distancing start)

- easily showing differences in time (e.g. dragging between two dates shows the number of days between them)

the8472• 6 years ago

- overlaying the graphs from the moment of the first case (shifting the data in time)

That's available in the bottom left. You can align to either deaths or confirmed cases.

pjc50• 6 years ago

What went wrong with Belgium??

DanBC2• 6 years ago

Belgium counts confirmed deaths in hospitals, but also counts suspected deaths outside hospitals -- so it's including care homes and nursing homes.

These deaths can be about 50% of the total deaths.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/is-comparing-c...

But such comparisons can be misleading. Unlike the UK, Italy or Spain, Belgium counts all coronavirus deaths outside hospitals in its daily statistics: deaths in care homes account for 53% of the total. Belgium’s official toll also includes people suspected of having died of coronavirus, without a confirmed diagnosis. Nearly all deaths in care homes (94%) are suspected Covid-19 cases, rather than confirmed – an approach that has led some to complain Belgium is overestimating the number of fatalities.

(They probably aren't over counting. Covid-19 is devastating for nursing homes and care homes).

sgt1012• 6 years ago

Yup, serious work to put the numbers on a solid footing required in the next months and years

Luc• 6 years ago

In some measure they have _less_ excess deaths than an average of the last years (after subtracting the counted Covid-19 cases), which would be an indication that they are over-counting.

raphaelj• 6 years ago

The government actually issues the two numbers [1].

Current (Apr 26) toll is 7,094 if you include suspected deaths, but is 3,596 if you only count positive cases.

[1] https://covid-19.sciensano.be/sites/default/files/Covid19/De...

simo72• 6 years ago

Actually in Italy (as well as France) deaths outside hospitals are counted.

cure• 6 years ago

This is correct. Most other countries are undercounting Covid-19 deaths significantly because they are only counting confirmed cases.

The problem becomes obvious when the total death numbers for the last few months are compared to the historical average.

See for example this NYT analysis, which shows that Belgium's numbers line up with the actual increase in death rate, not the more-or-less made up numbers from most other countries: https://www.nytimes.com./interactive/2020/04/21/world/corona...

catchmilk2• 6 years ago

UI is gorgeous. Anyone happen to know if they're using a charting library?

sk0g2• 6 years ago

Vue.JS/ Ruby/ D3 is what Wappalyzer picks up for this.

D3 is very powerful, but there's a lot to learn too!

catchmilk2• 6 years ago

Much appreciated. Any D3 learning resources you would personally recommend?

lettergram• 6 years ago

I’d recommend not using “cases”, but rather deaths. Most countries don’t have the testing capacity. In fact, if you look at places like the USA testing capacity is effectively flat. Yet 20% of the tests are coming back positive...

Italy on the other hand has seen a decrease in positive rate as they are increasing testing. That’s what happens as you’re nearing Or over a peak.

All countries seem to have some method of testing / adding suspect cases of people who died. As such, that’s probably the most accurate (albeit lagging) method of comparison.

https://github.com/lettergram/covid19-analysis

Tepix2• 6 years ago

Good idea. May not work well with countries reporting wrong numbers- even of deaths- on purpose, like Brazil.

dede4metal2• 6 years ago

Moreover in each country the definition of recovered is very different. The most strict is in Italy were you need two swabs both positives within 24h

Tepix2• 6 years ago

You mean negative? That does't sound like the strictest to me. I have heard Prof. Drosten talk about tests further apart

chvid2• 6 years ago

Deaths are also counted differently.

dilap2• 6 years ago

Death attribution can vary; I think deaths themselves -- as in, how many people have died, from any cause -- should be fairly reliable and comparable.

So for the clearest, most unbiased picture of COVID impact, calculate % increase over normal death rate by country, and then compare that.

(I guess. Just spitballing.)

FranOntanaya• 6 years ago

Excess deaths may work, considering we are in a relatively calm time when it comes to armed conflicts and such.

HenryBemis• 6 years ago

Yes they are. But the "deathcount-by-COVID" will be more accurate that "positive cases". The metric I am using and will be releasing once this thing blows over is "Deaths by COVID per million of population" (as measured in the latest census)(for each country)

I'll have it like (imagine spreadsheet columns): -Country name -County population (latest census) -Deaths by COVID -Deaths per 1 million (e.g. 100 deaths / 10m pop = 10) -Date of first death -Source of population data -Source of COVID death count

I am curious to see how countries that are "too big to fail" will perform (UK, USA) in comparison to other (Harari mentioned Greece on an interview).

I was checking and so far Greece has a ~13 Vs the UK which has ~320 ("ratios").

So congrats Boris Johnson!! You just killed x24 people!! (Great choice UK voters - keep up the wise choices!!!)

This isn't about BJ specifically, this is more to show how each country treated this situation and respecting its people (these are not just numbers, these are dead people, parents, grandparents, and some very few children). It would also be useful to then process these numbers and categorise the results (I am curious to see the ratios in the Triad USA, UK, Brazil Vs other similar sized countries with different-style leaders).

I also do not expect the truth from some countries (e.g. Russia, China, any Arab peninsula countries, NK etc.) or some African countries that are torn by civil wars or other conflicts. But I believe there will be a solid baseline and the outliers (below) will be easily pointed out as ineffective measured.

zelphirkalt• 6 years ago

The one thing I find to criticize is, that if you don't want to be tracked on that website, and disable Google fonts, the whole UI for the left side panel is messed up. This should have been tested and alternatives should have been provided. It is a classical and very common UI and usability mistake to simply assume that everyone will load Google fonts.

Aside from that, the visualization looks very nice.

mrtksn15• 6 years ago

Isn't it interesting that there isn't much of interest for the most successful major European-Asian country out there?

I am talking about Turkey, where death rates are even lower than Germany and the curfews are partial. There's an abundance of IC units despite the 100K cases and the spread curve is already going down and the country is in a position to offer substantial help to other major countries.

There have been some CNN[0] and BBC reporting on this but with the numbers THAT good, I would have expected much higher interest. I know about the democracy and free speech situation but the country is not North Korea, Turkey is actually doing that good in managing the situation.

Just switch Turkey on in this website and you'll see how much better Turkey is doing.

I am beginning to suspect that the Eurocentric mindset is literally killing Europeans at this time. There's a hugely successful country that is integrated with Europe, has some of its territory in Europe, it has a population of a large European country and yet nobody seems to think about looking at Turkey for an example.

As a quick note, Turkey manages to do this through aggressive contact tracing through thousands of tracking teams around the country. It was revealed that in Istanbul alone there are 1200 contact tracing teams consisting of doctors, nurses and etc. that track down every infection. It's not as cool as having Tech giants make an app but it works. According to the health ministry, these teams use purpose built apps to coordinate and the entire health system is well integrated and they monitor every single patients status - be it at home or in the hospital and have very good picture of the situation.

Turkey has many problems but the health system is not one of them and maybe it's worth taking a look at.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2020/04/21/inside-turke...

renox• 6 years ago

How about Czech Republic? I think that's an even better example.

mrtksn15• 6 years ago

Sure, why not, they are doing great too. However, Turkey has a population of 82 million(and more than 5 million refugees) which is in par with the UK, France, Germany. You don't have the excuse of "It's a small country" when it comes to Turkey.

Thousands of citizens were repatriated, large PPE deliveries to the UK, Spain, Italy and so on, the death rate is at 2.5, the hospital bed occupancy rate was at about %50, ICU occupancy rate at about 60% last time I checked.

The country is doing something right and is doing it right at scale.

Jemm• 6 years ago

That all depends on if you can trust the numbers coming out of Turkey.

mrtksn15• 6 years ago

I know but Turkey is not North Korea or Iran, there are many western journalists based in Turkey and they are indeed reporting that the situation is fine and the hospitals have plenty of capacity to go. There are some concerns on reporting methodology but these concerns are not different than those in the UK. Nothing that will change the picture substentially.

lm284698• 6 years ago

Turkey is essentially a dictatorship, if you want to believe in their numbers feel free to do so but I'm very skeptical about the accuracy of their reports.

mrtksn15• 6 years ago

You are right to be sceptical, it is indeed a dictatorship but it's not the kind of dictatorship that makes doctors disappear. There is no indication about any major cover-ups, the country is not insulated from the west, has visa-free travel with many Western countries, is part of many western institutions and has many wester journalists based in Turkey.

"I don't like Erdogan and his policies" is not good enough to dismiss Turkey as a closed society, the country is NOT like DPRK or Iran. Turkey is financially and institutionally integrated with Europe and the USA.

This(dismissing the country solely on its current political situation or lack of awareness beyond the stereotype and prejudice) is exactly the mentality that I am talking about and I suspect that it is killing many people in the west.

febeling2• 6 years ago

As someone with German perspective, I'm sure you have a point about Europe having a blind spot there.

Still, it looks like Turkey also are earlier in the curve, which would explain at least some of the better fatality numbers.

mrtksn15• 6 years ago

Why do you think Turkey is early in the curve, the new infections are falling and Turkey is doing more tests per capita than France or the UK.

That's probably an example of the blind eye.

kingofpandora• 6 years ago

Have spoken to a doctor you know in Turkey about the situation (I'm assuming you are Turkish)?

The ones on the ground don't have such a rosy view.

mrtksn15• 6 years ago

I have relatives in the business(doctors and nurses) who work in some of the largest hospitals that deal with the pandemic.

Obviously it's not a rosy situation when a hunders people are dying every day but I am yet to see a credible report of a cover-up.

My doctor relative told me that she had to buy some of her PPE and that they are getting paranoid about catching the bug but she doesn't think that the situation is worse than the reported. She complained about some management issues like asking people to get a test but not providing them with a safe place to queue and so on but no, people are not dying en mass here in Istanbul.

abdulmuhaimin• 6 years ago

sadly, many people refuse to set their prejudice aside and admit when someone(or country) is doing the right thing

MiguelVieira2• 6 years ago

I prefer this one. Use "New Deaths, 1 Wk. Avg." Plots US states as well as countries.

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

Fiahil• 6 years ago

Your data source is compromised. France's confirmed case count is 124k not 161k. You're off by 40k.

Source: https://dashboard.covid19.data.gouv.fr/

doodlebugging• 6 years ago

Sweden has an interesting pattern with a period of about one week. It appears that they have some activity that occurs weekly that results in new cases. There is a persistent 2-3 day plateau before the next caseload increase.

detaro• 6 years ago

You can see that for some other places too, e.g. Germany. I suspect it's just the weekend and reporting chains being slower then (it certainly plays a role in German data). The data then appears over the next week, but if you just daily calculate the difference between the numbers announced on that day for your graphs, you don't see that it is being backfilled in the new week, even if the country releases that detail.

stillbourne• 6 years ago

Can this also be weighted by number of tests per million?

Coronavirus Country Comparator

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